A virtual classroom experiment for teaching engineering economy

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

The other test treatment compared the impact of Web-based course materials on student performance. Table 14 shows the descriptive statistics and results for this test. Only non-project students were analyzed to test Hypothesis 3. This test indicated that the Web-based materials group did not improve on their scores as much as the non-Web-based materials group. Thus, the Web-based materials did not prove to be beneficial in the Fall 2000 experiment.

The statistical tests indicate that a significant difference in the actual final scores for the two sections did not occur (Hypothesis 4). However, previous student performance as indicated by an overall higher GPA (Hypothesis 6), would indicate the web-based materials negatively impacted learning in the experimental group. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the experimental group considered the website to be a substitute for going to class rather than the intended purpose of having the web-based instructional materials supplement live lectures. Attendance in the control group was better than for the experimental group. For example, on several occasions where class attendance was taken, an average of 79% of students in the control group were present and only 58% of the students in the experimental group were in class. While the experimental group accessed the web-based materials an average of 20 times during the semester, the experience apparently did not impart knowledge to the same degree as attending class lectures. Conclusions regarding the results of the Fall 2000 experiment are summarized in Table 15.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

The Spring 2000 experiment results strongly suggest that real industrial projects enhance the learning of engineering economy principles and methodology. We recommend that future studies be conducted to reaffirm this finding.

In the Fall 2000 experiment, the 10:10 a.m. lecture (experimental group) was possibly a different teaching situation than the 9:05 a.m. control group (not a media comparison but a change of content) because it:

1. involved the same instructor who may have not exactly replicated the 9:05 a.m. lecture for the 10:10 a.m. class;

2. guarded carefully against biasing the experimental group by giving students information known to be on the tests (overzealous correction for this bias may have worked against the 10:10 a.m. class); and

3. utilized the Internet as a supplement to the material taught and therefore changed the style of delivery. (Only 10 minutes at a time were devoted to Internet usage because of large class size and constraints imposed by the layout of the classroom.)

Were the 10:10 a.m. students, who accessed the Web site extensively, actually breezing through the electronic material and being lulled into a false sense of accomplishment in mastery of engineering economy? Perhaps we should have added learning competency questions that had to be answered correctly before the next module/set of screens could be viewed.

Although access to the Website for the 10:10 a.m (experimental) section did not seem to be a problem during the experiment, the site could have been password protected, disallowing students in the control group access to the online supplemental materials. We also observed that in large classes (more than 100 students), the use of team-based industrial projects would have been practically impossible to administer without the Internet. In smaller classes, it is more feasible to reap the learning benefits of industrial team-based projects without the Internet, and many studies have confirmed the increase in learning that occurs because of case-based materials. We found that students in Internet-supplemented course underperformed their fellow students in the traditional engineering economy course.