A Comparative Analysis of Student Performance and Face-to-Face Engineering Courses
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In March 2020, all courses were forced to rapidly migrate to an online or remote teaching/learning environment in order to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid change in teaching and learning modalities caused disruptions in learning cycles, which led to the development and adoption of mitigation strategies. In almost all cases, the faculty made the choice of transitioning to entirely online or remote teaching. The initial data from the Spring 2020 semester were mixed, with students indicating a mix of preferences for fully asynchronous online courses and live remote teaching using web conferencing tools. The data also showed a range of satisfaction in their experiences with online learning. With the understanding that the Fall semester and potentially the future year may require the use of alternative modalities of teaching, the College of Engineering at a large university in the southwest, identified high enrollment courses and supported the development of fully online courses. Despite all current knowledge around student satisfaction in higher education, researchers point out that much remains unknown. The effects of the specific course elements, individually and collectively, when designing a course are not fully understood (Chen et al., 2016; King, 2016). The multiple factors surrounding the achievement of learning outcomes can be related to several factors such as environment, learner aptitude, and course design elements (King, 2016; Simmons et al., 2016). The distinct effect specific to student engagement and learning strategies could potentially contribute to student satisfaction (Nuangchalerm et al., 2011). In addition, there is a paucity of studies that are focused on entirely online engineering courses. Previous studies have shown that faculty who have a high degree of help in instructional design and development of their online courses demonstrate better course outcomes (Gibson & Kinsey, 2018). So the college made the decision to provide faculty with substantial support in course design and development. Once these courses were identified for development, departments selected faculty to collaborate with the instructional technology support center to build fully online courses which were deployed for Fall 2020. This study will develop a comparative analysis of student performance in a fully online course and its equivalent face-to-face course. Additionally, this study seeks to develop an understanding of the metacognitive and self-regulatory factors that are related to enhanced student performance in online courses.
