2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Online education has been rapidly becoming the norm for Generation – Z education; however, the pandemic catapulted the movement of online learning in ways educators were not prepared for. Due to this rapid change, several aspects of online education need to be evaluated to ensure the best integration. For starters, GenZ is the first truly digital native generation, making it challenging to focus on a single device in an educational environment like an online lecture. Educators are also competing with the myriad of resources online that students often use to supplement online education. Finally, we are missing evidence-based research that can help provide guidelines for providing the best online education in today’s society. Therefore, this work investigates using active learning in an online course to determine the effect on students' performance and perceived learning outcomes based on exam, final grade, and course evaluation data to compare traditional passive online exercises with active in-lecture online exercises. Active lectures require students to continually engage with the video via practice problems with an option to watch solutions for incorrect responses. This work is a continuation of a work-in-progress paper submitted in 2021 and compares two modules in an online engineering economy course expanded over five semesters. The work-in-progress paper showed no evidence that active online lectures affect performance-based indicators (grades) but may affect students' perception of the course. This work will evaluate these two outcomes and provide guidelines and lessons learned for online courses using active exercises.