Work in progress — Design and assessment of an asynchronous on-line graduate Statistics course

Since 1985, the University of Virginia has offered a graduate course Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists. A similar course has been offered at Virginia Commonwealth University. Both are essential components in Virginia´s Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Program - a distance learning initiative involving universities, industry and government partners. This course has two distinct audiences - full time students in-residence at UVA, and those who attend classes through CGEP while maintaining full-time jobs. In this paper, we review the results of the first offering of this course in an asynchronous on-line mode. All lectures were recorded in Camtasia and coordinated with PowerPoint slides (available as PDFs). Student reactions were assessed through surveys and anonymous feedback, as well as comments and e-mails. The level of acceptance of the on-line lectures was surprising. Most students reported high levels of satisfaction with the quality of the material, mode of delivery, flexibility and convenience.