A year long project work of one of the mechanical engineering professors at Cal Poly Pomona has transformed the lecture heavy conventional teaching methodology off the mechanical engineering course into an interactive and interesting classroom environment. The professor created over 60 video course lessons together with smartly designed online homework platform to fulfill the purpose.
Additionally the lesson information was relayed to students outside the classrooms against the earlier routine of imparting it inside the lecture rooms. Hence, the class sessions started becoming more interactive where the lecturer and students communicated with each other and the homework program coupled with the videos used as resources only enhanced the learning experience.
The results were motivating because the number of students that passed this bottleneck course had comparatively increased as earlier only one third of the students had to repeat it in order to progress ahead. While the typical passing average for Mechanical and Civil Engineering course of fluid mechanics was 60% to 70% earlier, with the help of this new approach of digital education it increased to a staggering 83, 84 and 94 percent. Further student feedback to this approach is positive with many of them finding the format to be helpful in learning making it simple and easy. One of the students also pointed out how any confusion in understanding a particular topic was easy to resolve by revisiting the videos and further talking to the lecturer about it.
In order to ensure that the students were watching the videos for their homework, the professor mostly began his class with a quiz pertaining the video. Rest of it was spent by him in resolving queries and solving problems. Though the digital approach design was a long and hard working project which took an entire summer for the team of professors and psychologist at the university, the harvest was golden enough for the students as well as the professors. After the videos were uploaded online on YouTube they generated around 750,000 views and are now a part of the growing repository of mechanical engineering departmental videos of Cal Poly Pomona with a staggering number of 15000 subscribers besides boasting over 2 million views already.
Well, digital education might not be a norm at present and is a matter of choice for the institutions but looking into the benefits and results, it would be no wonder if digital education in engineering becomes a norm in the future.