Design and Project-Based Materials Education in On-campus and Online Cohorts

Education in materials science and engineering is an important component in any baccalaureate engineering program. For over 25 years, Deakin University in Australia, has delivered an accredited Bachelor of Engineering program both on-campus and online, with up to a third of the student body being off-campus. In this program, there are four materials courses, one in each year level. Materials and manufacturing-process selection are a key component in each of them. In recent years, the program curriculum has shifted its focus from the more traditional education methods of lecture, tutorial, and lab to active learning that revolves around design projects. We present our methods for teaching materials simultaneously to on-campus and online cohorts. The off-campus pedagogy has shifted over the years from textbooks and study guides to video presentations, online tutorials, and course websites. For both cohorts, learning outcomes are the same, with very similar average grade distributions.