Evaluating students on Internet enhanced engineering courses

Abstract

The effective implementation of the Internet on engineering undergraduate courses is far from being simple. Besides requiring a specific methodology, knowledge centered, it may also require different criterion for assessment and evaluation of student's learning. In a knowledge based educational environment, this also implies a continuous course evaluation. Actually, there are indications that the learning process may benefit from a more open minded and richer assessment and evaluation criterion, capable of motivating students to reach their highest potentials. However, handling this may be troublesome due to extra time consuming activities such as managing an email conference system, proposing challenging open problems and others, but also requiring the need for continuous feedback. Assessing the effectiveness of such resources may be difficult but a first step should include the efforts of committed students. Some of the aspects already being evaluated are presented for an undergraduate engineering course.