Lessons learned teaching engineering online to architecture and construction management students

The authors taught Timber Stuctural Systems (an engineering course for architectural and construction management students) online during the summer of 2002. While offering an engineering course online is not a new concept, offering an engineering course that relies on model building and experimentation to non-engineering majors posed many challenges but also resulted in many rewards. Both authors had taught the course previously in a traditional face-to-face classroom setting but neither had ever taught an online course. The lessons learned from this experience, recommendations for faculty teaching similar courses online, and future directions that will be taken by the authors are presented in this paper.