2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The delivery format of college and university courses lies on a spectrum with live face-to-face at one end, asynchronous virtual delivery at the other, and all other hybrid formats between them. Each delivery format has different affordances, with asynchronous online lectures providing an opportunity for increased flexibility in accommodating students schedules and the ability to pause and rewatch lectures at their own pace. However, this format does not afford interactions between instructor and students afforded by live, face-to-face lectures which limits adapting a lesson to individual questions and student feedback in real-time. With a broad array of delivery formats available it is important to evaluate how student performance is impacted by the choice of format.

Since 2017 an undergraduate course on microcomputers at the University of Alabama has been delivered in live face-to-face (3 sections), online asynchronous (2 sections), and hybrid flipped-class (2 sections) formats by the same instructor. For the asynchronous iterations the content was delivered using pre-recorded virtual lectures, online homework / projects / exams, and students were provided support through weekly virtual office hours. Participation with lectures was a mandatory course element with weekly deadlines for each set of lectures. For the flipped-style iteration, the course content was again delivered using the same pre-recorded virtual lectures (also as a mandatory course element with weekly deadlines), online homework / projects / exams, but students were able to attend optional face-to-face work periods with the course instructor during the regularly scheduled lecture times.

This work will provide a quantitative analysis and comparison of student overall course performance (e.g. final grade) across modalities to evaluate differences. Further, student opinions of course instruction, which captured student feedback using both Likert-scale questions and open-ended equations, will be analyzed to evaluate differences based on delivery format. Additionally, lessons learned based on the delivery of this course using different formats will be provided. These details are expected to help other engineering educators in evaluating how delivery format may impact their own courses as they are designing new courses or revising existing courses.