oa Using technology in engineering education

With the exponential rate of development in technology for delivering education, we now stand at the gateway of seeing sweeping changes in how the engineering students are educated in the 21^st century. These techniques will need to be tailored to satisfy the needs of the generation of students who are now in college—better known as the millennial students. These students have some unique characteristics which make it difficult for them to derive maximum benefits from the traditional teaching methods with hour-long classroom lectures. They have developed short attention spans and so, when they are not interested in something, their attention quickly shifts somewhere else. As a result, their ideal learning environment has changed to shorter lectures, use of a variety of multimedia, and collaborating with their peers for maximum effectiveness. With the help of technology, it has been found that techniques such as the flipped classroom and on-line and hybrid offering of the class are helping today's students to become independent learners, an attribute that will be extremely useful in their future where lifelong learning has become an integral part of a person's working career.

For the past three years I have been offering two math-based courses as a hybrid class using the inverted classroom model. During this period, I have offered 15 sections to about 400 students with extreme success. In my presentation I will discuss the changes which I have made in my courses to teach them as a “paperless” class using technology. I will also relate my experiences with these courses and the improvement in results obtained from this change.