A virtual classroom experiment for teaching engineering economy

Engineering Economist, Winter, 2004 by William G. Sullivan, Janis P. Terpenny, Harpreet Singh

The inclusion of out-of-the-classroom supplemental materials and activities, particularly real-world industry-provided problems, is known to reinforce concepts and improve learning in ways not available through traditional methods of lecture. Students develop problem-solving skills, project management skills, communication and teaming skills, and a sense of professionalism through such experiences. For Engineering Economy in particular, real-world problems convey the difficulties of data gathering, assumption making, and problem formulation, and bring to light the importance of economic analysis in decision making. While the potential benefits may be great from real-world problems and supplemental materials, the investment of time and effort in creating and administering these can be significant. Reflecting on limited resources and time of all participants, one must question whether student learning is sufficiently improved to justify the significant effort required for offering such experiences in courses other than senior design courses, the most typical course for such enriched experiences. Further, if learning can be improved, are there methods or technologies that could possibly reduce the logistics and improve the experience for all participants?

This article reports on two separate experiments performed on classes of Engineering Economy (ISE 2014) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. An experiment was conducted in the Spring of 2000 to determine the impact on learning of Web-based industrial team projects provided by General Electric (GE) and in the Fall of 2000 to determine the influence of Web-based supplemental course materials on learning. Background literature is reported below and followed by a detailed description of the two experimental treatments to assess student learning in ISE 2014. Conclusions and recommendations for further study are also provided.

Background

The rapid growth and affordability of Internet and computer technology has provided an immense opportunity for educational institutions to expand, enhance, and perhaps replace traditional classroom teaching. Web-based instruction, or the virtual classroom as it is sometimes known, is an environment that can potentially facilitate collaborative learning among students, between students and instructors, among instructors, and between an entire class and wider academic and non-academic communities [2, 25, 31]. The virtual classroom can also be used to support independent and active learning techniques and self-paced instruction [6]. While the Internet offers many new potential benefits, exactly how and to what degree the Internet is effective in education is an important question to address. This is especially true in light of recent studies that show classroom instruction cannot be effectively replaced solely by a virtual classroom environment [10]. When used as a supplement to the classroom, however, the Internet has been shown to be an effective medium for enabling new approaches to education. It can help to define an interactive learning environment with new opportunities for students to experience distributed and cross-functional teams, increased personal attention, and collaboration with industry for teams as well as individual students [1, 10, 11, 20].

Web-based instruction is an evolution of computer-assisted instruction (CAI). While the benefits of CAI have been difficult to substantiate empirically, many studies have found a definite reduction in learning time for computer instruction, representing a significant advantage for industrial training programs [9]. Another significant benefit of CAI is its cost effectiveness, particularly as the cost of computer hardware continues to decrease and software platforms for developing instructional treatments proliferate [9, 30].

CAI has become the backbone of many "media" comparison studies. Studies have treated the media as the independent variable and performance (e.g., a grade or final score) as the dependent variable. Clark [3]/[18] and Russell observe that "no significant difference" in media studies is a common finding and it simply suggests that changes in outcome score did not result from any systematic differences in the treatments compared. One of the difficulties with such studies involving the "soft" sciences is that point null hypotheses (such as there is no difference between two groups of participants' mean scores) are an inadequate construct for testing learning of a subject matter, particularly if the course materials are unintentionally altered because of the learning medium being considered.

As described in the sections that follow, the experiments and results reported in this article were part of a larger project whose purpose was to develop a virtual classroom for teaching the economics of engineering design, including on-line course modules, practice quizzes, and administrative support tools, in addition to the industry collaborative projects [24, 26, 27]. Appendix A describes the overall design of the virtual classroom and provides samples of several specific Web pages.