Differences in learning outcomes and engagement across traditional, blended, and online engineering management undergraduate courses
Traditionally, Engineering Management (EM) courses have formed part of graduate programs. These courses usually included some type of asynchronous learning delivery system to give more flexibility to the students who had a full-time job and family commitments. The relevance of acquiring business and social skills to succeed in the industry has become evident. Thus, an increasing number of universities have incorporated EM courses into the undergraduate curriculum with many offering minors in EM. The new EM courses at the undergraduate level carried with them asynchronous learning characteristics that allow for distance learning and online interaction giving students more flexibility compared to traditional synchronous courses. Through this research, the differences in learning outcomes and engagement across four different types of undergraduate students belonging to a traditional, a blended, or an online EM course, have been studied for the first time. These differences were analyzed for a quantitative course and a qualitative course across five consecutive terms. A total of 390 students from the University of Colorado-Boulder participated in the study. The results indicate that learning outcomes, such as homework and tests grades, improved when transitioning from a traditional course to a blended course to an online course. However, when comparing face-to-face and distance students within blended courses, distance students showed to have a lower learning quality experience than faceto- face students. The results of this study can aid institutions in making decisions regarding course modality implementation.