The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate how a dual delivery mode (content being simultaneously delivered to face-to-face and online students) can be used effectively in engineering education and with very little extra effort from the instructor using a Tablet PC as a teaching platform. Synchronous delivery of lectures to online students is achieved using Elluminate Live!, a multipoint videoconferencing software that is available for use free of charge to all faculty and staff of the California Community College system through CCC Confer, a project funded by a grant from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office. Using two years worth of data from a sophomore-level Circuits Analysis course, the performance of online and on-campus students on identical tests, homework assignments, and final exams were compared. Results show that the online class to be at least as effective as the traditional on-campus, face-to-face format. The retention rates are almost the same for the online and on-campus groups, and the success rates are identical. There is no statistically significant difference in the levels of performance of the two groups despite two factors that create a more favorable demographic distribution of for the on-campus group (more Electrical Engineering majors and more students taking the lab course). To determine the factors that contribute to the success of online students who mostly did not participate in the synchronous lecture sessions due to scheduling conflicts, a comparison of student usage of available class resources was done. Online students downloaded archived CCC Confer lectures about six times more frequently than on-campus. These downloadable archived lectures allow for more flexibility in viewing through features such as rewind, fast forward, pause, etc., giving students more control of the learning process compared to listening to a live lecture. Results of previous research indicate that conditions in which learners have more control of their learning produce larger learning gains than do instructor-directed conditions. For instance, one study showed that simply giving students the ability to randomly access materials, allowing them to watch videos in any sequence, and to rewind and fast forward through their content, resulted in a statistically significant positive gain in learning. For the Circuits course at Cañada, even though such functionality is available to both online and on-campus students, the on-campus students rarely accessed these archived lectures. The online students also found their learning experience in the Cañada College Circuits course better than other online courses that they have taken. A majority of them indicated that the online experience was enhanced by availability of the archived CCC Confer lectures, and the students' ability to review the archives at their own pace. It should be noted that most of the online students would not have been able to take the on-campus section of the class, and would not have been able to complete their lower-division requirements and transfer to a four-year institution in a timely manner without the online option. This is especially important for minority and female students whose pursuit of demanding professions, such as engineering and the physical sciences, are negatively affected by financial difficulties and demanding family obligations Although the sample sizes used in the study were small, results indicate that the use of dual delivery mode to synchronously deliver course content to on-campus and off-campus students can be an effective way of increasing teaching efficiency. This is particularly important for small engineering programs (particularly those in community colleges) where budget cuts and low enrollments threaten the viability of course offerings and entire engineering programs. For California community colleges in particular, this can be accomplished without any extra costs through CCC Confer.
