A distance education course in Computer Engineering at NC State University

This paper discusses lessons learned from a distance education experiment between the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC-A) and NC State University (NCSU). NCSU is located in the eastern portion of North Carolina, approximately 250 miles from UNC-A. A sophomore level core course in both the Electrical and Computer Engineering curricula was taught using a completely synchronous delivery mechanism on a traditional closed circuit television network during the first semester of the experiment. An Internet-based, asynchronous delivery mechanism was included during the subsequent semester. This paper provides details of the methods used at NCSU, along with a presentation of the advantages and disadvantages of each delivery mechanism. A major point of the paper is that when we considered the issue of student learning, there was no statistical difference in performance between the students at the remote location and the students at NC State University.