Assessment of a hybrid, online/in-class course developed at multiple universities

In Fall 2007, a coalition of four universities was awarded an NSF CCLI grant to support the development of a curriculum with the goal of cultivating systems thinking in students. Systems thinking, as defined in this project, is the ability to envision architectures of complexengineered systems and the principles that underlie them. The effort, deemed MUSE - Multi-University Systems Education - has developed a unique course to instill such systems skills. This undergraduate course, Wireless Sensor Network Design, not only introduces students to a timely technology but utilizes this topic to bring together material from a variety of subject matters that students had heretofore studied in isolation. To develop the course, faculty at each institution contributed online modules in topics of their expertise but with the material refocused to emphasize relevance to sensor networks and interaction with other electrical engineering subdisciplines. These modules were created utilizing Tablet PCs and Camtasia Studio screen recording software. In Fall 2008, the course was piloted at Northern Arizona University. A hybrid lecturing approach was employed where students interacted with online content the equivalent one lecture per week and then discussed the material in-class, once a week. In this paper, assessment results of the initial course offering are reported in three areas. First, students evaluated the content delivery method along with the course content quality and engagement. Second, students were evaluated pre- and post-course with a systems-oriented task to evaluate whether holistic skills were being developed. Finally, the course developers were evaluated on the collaborative aspects of the project along with the approach for creating content.