Abstract:

When teaching a course for the first time many lecturers have a tough time deciding whether to use the whiteboard for teaching, prepare personations or use a combination of the two. After almost 20 years of teaching undergraduate students in Electrical Engineering the author compares courses taught without any presentations to those that used presentations as the main tool for teaching. The author compares courses that were given in both forms over the years in terms of capacity, students grades and the feedback the students gave at the end of the course. The courses compared are introduction to Electrical Engineering, Signals and Systems, and Communication Systems. These courses were taught in two different Engineering colleges for 18 consecutive years, sometimes with the help of presentations and sometimes without. Results indicate that although the final grades of the students are hardly affected by the means of teaching, the capacity of the course increases dramatically when using presentations and the students' feedback decreases dramatically at the same time. Results also indicate that uploading the lecture notes (or presentations) to the course site before an actual lecture increases both the capacity of the course and the students' grades.

Keywords:

Engineering Education, Methodology.