Student Self-Efficacy and Satisfaction: A Comparative Analysis of Online and Onsite Versions of an Analog Electric Circuits Lab

We present the design, operation, and analysis of an online introductory-level analog electric circuits course. The course is an adaptation of a sophomore-level onsite course taught in its current form at the University of Maryland, College Park for a decade and has both a traditional lecture component and an active-learning laboratory component. We compare the expectations, attitudes, and performance of the students whose lab sections were online to those students who took the traditional onsite lab. The study was preformed across four sessions from the summer of 2020 through the summer of 2021 with a total of 111 students. The summer classes were 100% online, but the fall and spring semesters had a mix of onsite and online lab sections. A total of 34 students took the onsite version of the lab leaving 77 students in the online lab sections. Twenty-six percent of the students were female, Hispanic, or African American. The percentage of students passing the course was 88% both for the full cohort and for the underserved population. The percentage of online students passing the course was 92%. Student surveys probed the students' expectations, level of satisfaction, and self-efficacy and focus groups were conducted to help validate survey results. While onsite lab students had higher expectations and were more satisfied with their lab experience, the two cohorts reported similar feelings of self-efficacy. The post-course analyses helped to improve the online course from one semester to the next, but the quality of the interaction with the instructors and teaching assistants was found to have a significant impact on the students' responses.