A Mixed Approach for Distance Engineering and Technology Education

Distance education has been undergoing dramatically evolution since it debuted, especially over the past decades with the rapid advancement of computer, interne, and information technologies. The distance educations are growth at a higher speed than anticipated by many educational institutions. By taking the advantages of modern technologies, an online education can provide quality education at anytime and anywhere. Many software systems such as MOODLE, WebCT, Blackboard, Angel, etc., are easily used by distance education instructors to develop and deploy non-technical courses, which do not necessarily require extensive hands-on labs. However, in engineering and technology disciplines, laboratory experiments play an essential role in the education for applying the theoretical concepts to the real world solutions. Thus, the incorporation of laboratory experiment work in an online program becomes a significant challenge to engineering and technology educator. This paper addresses this challenge with a mixed strategy. Both the lecture and laboratory experiments delivery systems are discussed in detail. The approaches dealt with in this paper for the delivery of online engineering education can serve as a model for the design of online curriculums in a variety of engineering and technology curriculums.