2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Instructional Benefits of a Web-Based Students’ Concurrent Course Registration Tool

Presented at New Engineering Educators (NEE) Technical Session 2 - Technology Tools (VR and AI)

Data-driven approaches have the potential to reshape course design and lesson planning in modern education by providing instructors with actionable insights into student learning environments. A web-based tool has recently been developed to offer instructors real-time access to students' concurrent course registration data. Initially developed to help instructors highlight interdisciplinary connections between courses, the tool has shown broader potential for enhancing course design and instructional strategies. By revealing key information, such as how many students are concurrently enrolled in prerequisites or are taking high-demand courses simultaneously, instructors can adjust their lesson plans or provide special instructional help to better accommodate students’ academic needs and workloads.
This tool uses a table and a histogram to present the collected students’ course registration data (both student numbers and percentages) and allows the users to select the concurrent registration data and the cumulative registration data. Users are allowed to set the cutoff percentage to control the number of data to be presented on the webpage.
A beta version of this tool was first released to a group of faculty in various departments who teach a range of courses, from introductory classes with hundreds of students to advanced electives with only a handful of students. The preliminary feedback on the tool has been tremendously positive with many faculty reporting that this helps them better understand their students. Following this positive feedback, version 1.0 of the tool was released to the faculty of the entire College of Engineering. Surveys and interviews were conducted to investigate what information instructors retrieve, the point of the semester of this retrieval, and, most importantly, how this information is utilized by instructors to improve educational and pedagogical efforts. Further analysis is focused on the value and application of such information to explore and assess the contribution of this new tool for data-driven instruction.

Authors

Dr. Ke Tang University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Ke Tang is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests focus on engineering education, particularly on student-centered pedagogies, data-driven instruction, and interdisciplinary education.
Dr. Thomas Golecki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0750-8582 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

I spent 10+ years in industry as an engineer in structural mechanics and structural health monitoring projects, earning professional licensure as PE and SE. My PhD research focused on the structural optimization of dynamic systems including random loading and vehicle-bridge interaction. Now as teaching faculty, I try to connect course concepts to real-world examples in a way that motivates and engages students.
Dr. Jennifer R Amos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9437-8201 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Professor in Bioengineering.
Prof. Jacob Henschen University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Professor Henschen completed his B.S., M.S., and PhD. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007, 2009, and 2018 respectively. He was an Assistant Professor at Valparaiso University until he moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Teaching Assistant Professor in June 2020. He serves as the co-chair for the Teaching Methods and Education Materials Committee at ACI and the co-chair of the Committee on Faculty Development at ASCE.
Dr. Abdussalam Alawini University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Home
Abdussalam Alawini
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
e~ma!l: alawini (at) Illinois {dot} EDU
I am a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Illinois at Urba
Dr. Matthew D Goodman University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Goodman received degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from Iowa State University (B.S. & M.S.) and the University of Illinois (Ph.D.). Currently, he is a senior lecturer in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at University of Illinois and a Siebel Center for Design Affiliate. There, he teaches introductory materials science courses to non-majors as well as the major-specific capstone sequence, utilizing and emphasizing the Human-Centered Design framework.
Dr. Halim Beere University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Beere is a Web Application Developer for the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Music Composition from the School of Music at the same university, with research focused on algorithmic composition and the "livecoding" performance practice. In his current role, he builds and maintains web applications that support education and research, blending technical expertise with creative problem-solving.

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The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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