A hybrid online-education strategy for delivering engineering and technology courses

With the rapid advancement of computer, internet, and information technologies, and the ever-increasing needs for access to higher education from non-traditional learners with full-time jobs and those with family responsibilities, the distance educations are growth at a higher speed than anticipated by many educational institutions. By taking the advantages of modern technologies, an online education can provide quality education at anytime and anywhere. Many online software systems such as WebCT, Blackboard, Angel, etc., are easily used by distance education instructors to develop and deploy non-technical courses, which do not necessarily require extensive hands-on labs. However, in engineering technology disciplines, laboratory experiments serve as the essential tools for relating the theoretical concepts to the real world solutions. Thus, the incorporation of hands-on lab work in an online program becomes a significant challenge to engineering and technology educator. This paper addresses this challenge with a hybrid strategy. Both the lecture and laboratory experiments delivery systems are discussed in detail. The approaches dealt with in this paper for the delivery of online engineering education can serve as, especially at this economic situation, a model for the design of online curriculums in a variety of engineering and technology curriculums.