Executive Summary of Results

Need for the Project

IUPUI is unique in offering an associate degree in electronics manufacturing focusing on the assembly of circuit boards. The student population for this curriculum is scattered across the state and country. Since the industry technology changes very rapidly, there are no textbooks – and any book written on the subject would be out of date before it got to press. Another important requirement is giving the students hands-on lab activities to become familiar with the manufacturing processes and equipment.

The on-campus version of EET M200 (offered previously) used re-prints of trade magazine articles to supplement lectures and video exhibitions. Laboratories utilized the Mobile Electronics Manufacturing Laboratory (MEML) and a proto-type line in the ET laboratories. Delivery of the course material and laboratories had to be revised to make them accessible to distant students.

Use of Technology

Each lesson consists of a Web page including a link to an online slide presentation with graphics and notes covering the lesson topic. Links to current, online articles give the students application examples. For some lessons, students are required to view a video (produced by the IPC Association Connecting Electronics Industries). Laboratories utilize equipment at the student’s location and an on-site mentor supplied by the company.

Instructional Design Plan

Describe how the use of technology used supported your teaching approach:

• What student learning outcomes were expected?
• How did your teaching plan encourage active learning, provide feedback, address respective learning styles, and build collaboration?
• What resources were used? (campus technology support services, etc.)
• Would your project be easily understood and executed by other faculty?

Specific student learning objectives are given for each lesson. General outcomes for the class include:

• Students will be able to explain Surface Mount and Thru-Hole Assembly processes, including individual procedures and their interactions.
• Students will be able to explain the operation or operate the equipment used by their company to assembly circuit boards.

Our teaching plan uses a variety of assignments to encourage active learning. The on-site mentor is used as a resource to assist with assignments and to provide immediate feedback. At this point, there is only one student per location, so group projects have not been implemented. When more students are available per location, assignments will be adapted to allow more “live” interaction.

Oncourse is the framework used to organize and deliver the course. Oncourse makes it easy to pull resources from a variety of locations. On-site mentors can also have access to Oncourse and can easily correspond with the professor in charge of the course. Thus, other faculty could easily apply the teaching approach used in this project, as long as on-site mentors are available.

Potential to Impact Student Learning

Clearly define how your project improved student learning - include specific examples of how your project:

• Fostered depth of learning
• Supported efforts to improve retention
• Fostered the learning of large numbers of students
• Has broader applications that will affect learning K-12 or community environments?

Including hands-on projects and assignments that are applicable to the work place are the main ways this project fosters depth of learning. The on-site mentor will help with retention: the student should find it easier to ask questions of someone at their facility than to pose a question via phone or email to their professor. Also, the on-site mentor can act as a “lab T.A.” and allow many more students to have a laboratory experience than one professor could handle.

Assessment Plan

Briefly explain the effectiveness of your assessment plan:

• What measure of assessment was used?
• How did your approach obtain measures of performance?
• Did you feel your measurement was accurate and effective?

Student assignments were graded and evaluated for mastery of the material. These assignments were compared to on-campus students’ work when possible. However, this form of assessment was hampered by the lack of off campus students. Students were also periodically asked about the organization and execution of the class: i.e. “how they think it’s going.” These methods worked well for formative evaluations, and led to refinements of how the material is presented. However, until more off-campus students take the class, no summative evaluations may be done.

Plan for Colleague Development

Describe your role and activities as a mentor:

• What mentoring activities were implemented to assist colleagues?
• How did you help to develop colleague's instructional technology skills?
• How do you think your contributions to the Knowledge Base will help colleagues planning similar projects?
• Is your project approach potentially applicable to other contexts or disciplines?
• What tips would you offer?

I am preparing an abstract for submission to the American Society of Engineering Educators for publication in conference proceedings. Informally, I have shared my ideas with colleagues developing online courses.

Final Comments on Project Results

• Do you think you met the goals of your project?
• What, if anything,would you do differently?
• Did you have any unexpected outcomes? (positive or negative)
• Would you recommend this teaching approach to colleagues?
• What other comments or suggestions would you offer to complete this report?

• We did successfully launch the course, implementing the online lessons and laboratory assignments. However, lack of off-campus students limited the summative assessment we could do. Preliminary results and informal surveys indicate that the assignments are feasible at most electronics manufacturing sites.
• IU requires students to pay out of state tuition for students from outside of Indiana for online courses. This means that our course costs as much as proprietary, “in-house” training – and prices us out of most (out-of-state) companies’ budgets.
• Online learning works well for students who wish to explore the topic in a non-linear way. Students who are used to (and claim they like) reading a textbook struggled to recognize the key points in the information and links provided – even though objectives were provided for each lesson. To make this course assessable to these students, future development should include
  1. Training on what objectives are and how students should use them
  2. Many, many questions that students must answer before proceeding to the next objective or lesson (Oncourse’s testing tool may be used for this)
  3. Some type of guide through each lesson so students can insure they access all the relevant information
• As has been stated before, developing online content is time intensive. We found the most efficient method (for us) was to
  1. Create a lesson home page
  2. Create a PowerPoint presentation with detailed information for the lesson
  3. Save the presentation as a “Web Page.” In reality, this creates many HTML files: a main page (with frames) and a directory with supporting files.
  4. FTP the presentation Web page (including the directory with the supporting files) and the lesson home page to an file server (Champion account)
  5. Link to the presentation from the lesson home page.
  6. Link to the lesson home page from the Schedule Item in Oncourse.
• We have a plan for what mentors should do, but further development will be needed as we work with more mentors.
• Online testing has many pit-falls. Although we were successful with the mechanics of creating a test using the Oncourse testing tool, we made mistakes with implementation. More dialog is needed – along with recommendations regarding pedagogy. For instance – if you let students see the results, they will want to know what questions they missed. Then they will want to know what the correct answer is. Then they could share the correct answers with other students. Also, if a student inadvertently hits the “Enter” key while in the test, s/he will submit the test – even if it is not done. For the student to start again, the instructor must erase his/her results, and then the student must take the entire test again. And, if the instructor accidentally erases the wrong student’s file, the results are lost forever.

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Last updated: 18 May, 2007

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