On-campus and off-campus first-year electrical engineering students engage in interactive learning environments

Universally available Internet and Web technologies support interactive learning environments for both on-campus and off-campus students in an introductory course in electrical engineering. This paper describes the rationale for the course and reports the results of scaling up online discussions from a 15-student on-campus honours section of the course taught during the fall semester of 1999 to a class of approximately 50 on-campus and off-campus students taught during the spring semester of 2000. The off-campus students comprised high-achieving high school students who enrolled in the course under a pilot offering of the Texas Tech University Early Admissions Program (EAP). An overview of the EAP and initial results of this pilot offering are discussed in the paper.