Cross-institutional Collaboration on Hybrid Engineering Courses among Institutions in New Mexico

Abstract

This paper presents a two-year pilot project involving cross-institutional collaborations among the University of New Mexico (UNM), Northern New Mexico College (NNMC), and Central New Mexico Community College (CNM). The primary objective of this project is to leverage the limited resources available in New Mexico (NM) to provide quality STEM undergraduate education to a large student population. The immediate goal is to develop a pedagogy that allows for demonstrable and repeatable success in this environment using a few targeted courses, with the longer-term goal of expanding the results of this research across all higher education institutions in NM and to any STEM-related discipline. The project focuses on the creation of online instructional materials and pedagogy related to existing lower-division courses in computing disciplines including Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Information Engineering Technology. Historically, these computer disciplines have mostly been taught independently from each other, at different departments and institutions. The fact that they all have overlap in content results in duplicated offerings. Moreover, this duplication of offerings can be seen at a larger scale through the whole state of New Mexico, where curricula at distant schools in the same state share significant knowledge units such as computer programming, logic design, etc. This project consolidates course offerings across the state of New Mexico in computing disciplines. The project includes instructional online lecture materials, support structures, and a virtual lab model that ensure the same or better quality of learning than face-to-face offerings. A detailed description of the pilot project including student learning outcomes, rubrics, labs, and activities is presented.