2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a portable course to teach introductory digital logic. The goals of this course are to simultaneously meet existing accreditation criteria while providing a course that has the potential of being administered completely online. The online characteristic of the course gives the instructor the ability to teach the class in numerous delivery modes. These include an asynchronous online delivery or as supplementary resources for a synchronous face-to-face delivery. The inclusion of a low-cost portable lab kit provides additional flexibility by supporting either the traditional 2-hour on-campus lab section or a more asynchronous lab-anywhere mode. This paper will describe the design of the course, the corresponding learning objectives, the supporting learning activities, and the learning assessment. This paper will present student performance comparisons for different delivery modes collected over the past 4 years at a medium-sized land grant university. This paper will also provide data on the impact of an adaptive learning component of the course that was implemented for the more difficult course concepts. The adaptive learning component allows the student to receive additional computer instruction on a topic that varies the level of difficulty based on automated formative assessment. The adaptive learning component of the course was shown to have a significant impact on students with GPAs between 2.5 – 3.0 on one of the outcomes without needing instructor interaction. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, thus all resources for the course are open to the engineering education community. This paper will be of interest to any engineering educator that teaches digital logic or anyone that has interest in augmenting their current course with online resources or switching to a portable lab kit.