2025 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. With a broad array of delivery formats available it is important to evaluate how students chose to participate in each style to evaluate how to structure each formatted course.

Since 2020 an undergraduate course on microcomputers at the University of Alabama has been either an online asynchronous format (1 section) or hybrid flipped-class format (4 sections) coordinated by the same instructor. For both styles, the content was delivered using pre-recorded virtual lectures, online homework and laboratory activities to provide opportunities to engage and master material. To assess individual mastery of course content after these elements cumulative examinations were required to be taken by all students. Participation with lectures was a mandatory course element with weekly deadlines for 2-3 lectures each week of the course. To encourage students to watch the lectures, 5% of the overall course grade was linked to the watch records with a minor deduction (-0.25% or -0.5%, dependent on the section) for each lecture not watched by the assigned deadline.

This work will provide a quantitative analysis and comparison of students viewership patterns of the online lectures with their performance in the course. The aim of this analysis is to answer the following research questions: 1) What proportion of students watch assigned lectures more than 24 hours before their assigned deadline? and 2) Do students who watch assigned lectures more than 24 hours before deadlines students demonstrate greater mastery of course material than their peers who do not? Further, student opinions of course instruction, which captured feedback using open-ended equations, will be analyzed to identify what students perceptions regarding the required viewing of online lectures emerge. These details are expected to help other engineering educators in evaluating how to structure course policies regarding watching online lectures in their courses to support their overall course objectives.