Creating Alternative Learning Strategies for Transfer Engineering Programs

Community colleges play an important role in educating future engineers and scientists, especially students from traditionally underrepresented groups. Two-plus-two programs and articulation agreements between community colleges and four-year institutions allow community college students to take their lower-division courses at local community colleges and then transfer to a university to complete their baccalaureate degrees. For many small community colleges, however, developing a comprehensive transfer engineering program can be challenging due to a lack of facilities, resources, and local expertise. As a result, many community college students transfer without completing the necessary courses for transfer, making timely completion of degrees difficult. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, three community colleges in California collaborated to develop resources and teaching strategies to enable small community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. The biggest challenge in developing such strategies lies in designing and implementing courses that have lab components.

This presentation focuses on the results of the collaborative project, Creating Alternative Learning Strategies for Transfer Engineering Programs (CALSTEP), which aims to strengthen community college engineering programs using distance education and other alternative delivery strategies that will enable small-to-medium community college engineering programs to support lower-division engineering courses that students need to be competitive for transfer to four-year engineering programs. The project has leveraged existing educational resources and develop new ones for online lecture courses, as well as core engineering laboratory courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. The initial areas of focus for laboratory course development are: Introduction to Engineering, Engineering Graphics, Materials Science, and Circuit Analysis. CALSTEP has also developed alternative models of flipped classroom instruction to improve student success and enhance student access to engineering courses that otherwise could not be supported in traditional delivery modes due to low enrollment. The project also aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum and train other community college engineering faculty in the effective use of the curriculum and resources developed. The presentation will also highlight the results of the implementation of the courses including comparison of the outcomes of the online course with those from a regular, face-to-face course. Additionally student surveys conducted in both the online and face-to-face courses are used to document and compare students’ perceptions of their learning experience, the effectiveness of the course resources, their use of these resources, and their overall satisfaction with the curriculum.