Creating Self-Paced Online Engineering Courses for Post Graduate and Senior Undergraduate Students on Pavement Management

Abstract

Compared with traditional engineering courses taught in classrooms, a self-paced online engineering course has the advantages of distance learning, flexible study schedules, and it utilizes rapid growing technologies including computers, internet, and software. In this paper, the knowledge and experience of creating several self-paced online pavement management courses were synthesized. Using these pavement management courses as examples, this paper illustrates the procedure for developing online courses, and the dos and don’ts of designing online classes. The principles of developing these online courses are also presented in the paper. These principles include making contents attractive with graphs and videos, creating effective quizzes with proper feedback, developing exam databanks with randomly selected test questions for fairness, making navigation easy within a course, and automatically generating certificates to document successful completion. In addition, the paper presents the advantages and challenges of distance learning on self-paced engineering courses.