Globalization has exacerbated the need for engineers who are capable of working in a cross-cultural environment. Multinational companies continuously seek for engineers who are intercultural competent and capable of conducting business successfully in a cross-cultural environment. However, the skills required to be successful in a multicultural environment are difficult to be taught in the traditional classroom. One of the most effective approaches to acquiring intercultural competence skills is through experiential learning. It is, therefore, not surprising that most colleges all over the world are devoting resources towards the internationalization of their classrooms and the campus community. This ensures that students are provided with a diverse environment so they can learn from, and about diverse cultures and develop their intercultural competence skills. Another effective approach is the study abroad programs, which require students to travel to different countries. However, these approaches require a lot of resources that may not be available to the poor and needy students. Therefore, a more cost-effective approach, such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is receiving a lot of attention in recent years. In this study, some engineering technology students participated in an 8-week long COIL program with materials engineering students from different languacultural and geographical region. This study reviews the results and compares the performance of the COIL students with those who were not involved. It was observed that the COIL teams performed significantly better on the project work.

The advent of Covid-19 provided an enormous academic and logistical challenge to almost all academic institutions in the United States and around the world. As a precautionary measure surrounding the novel coronavirus and in line with recommendations from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at that time (spring 2020), most higher education institutions in the United States shut down campuses and completed the second half of the spring 2020 semester virtually. During the fall 2020 semester, when relatively more was known about the virus, some institutions started with face-to-face classes but had to switch to virtual learning after noticing a spread of the coronavirus on their campuses. Others adopted a blended approach that supplements face-to-face meetings with virtual learning synchronously or asynchronously. Whichever approach adopted in place of the traditional face-to-face meetings did not necessarily solve the challenge faced by Engineering Technology programs, which typically infuse hands-on learning in most of the courses in their curriculum. Due to the applied nature of engineering technology, it is important to ensure that students stay engaged with creative ways to learn by doing. And to ensure that the students do not miss critical course content in virtual and blended engineering technology courses, it is vital that the students maintain high interactions with online resources such as class video recordings. This paper reviews students’ patterns of interactions with course videos to assess its impact on the academic success of engineering technology students in some upper-level blended courses delivered during the spring and fall 2020 semesters.

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The classroom experience has evolved from traditional lecture, PowerPoint and whiteboards to a more active environment where students and instructors work together more on hands-on activities to achieve the course objectives. Various names have been given to this pedagogy; experiential learning, project-based learning, active learning, problem-based learning are a handful of names used to describe this evolving pedagogy. The main challenge faced by educators in educating undergraduate students to be independent thinkers and problem solvers, has been the driving force fueling the shift in pedagogy. The skill sets needed to be successful in the workforce has also evolved over the years. Today’s employees are not only expected to demonstrate proficiency in green skills in their field of study, but must also possess soft skills required to be competitive in the industry. Gone are the days where engineers worked in silos applying their green skills to create for the common good. To be productive, employers expect today’s engineer to demonstrate the ability to work in teams, communicate effectively, while applying the technical and analytical know-how needed to achieve a desired goal. To ensure that undergraduate students have these desired skills, most engineering educators have shifted away from the traditional all lecture classes and are applying active learning pedagogies. This research looks into student’s perception on project-based learning with client based and non-client based projects in terms of: the project as a learning device, contribution to research knowledge, motivation to learn, contribution to skills and personal benefits, and their effects on student evaluation of teaching and motivation to learn.

Client based service projects offer many advantages to instructors, students and host communities. However, instructors must carefully choose the projects in order to achieve the benefits that come with this pedagogical tool. The purpose of this research was to investigate the perception of engineering technology students on how different service projects influence performance and perceived skills. A modified perceived skill model was used to measure the perceived effect of the team based service projects on: motivation to learn, contribution to research knowledge, skills and personal benefit, and project as a learning device. The projects were either client based or non-client based. In addition, they were categorized as either engineering, non-engineering, or some engineering projects. The non-engineering were the projects with no engineering content, whereas those with some form of engineering content were classified as some engineering. From the results, it appears that all the project types and categories were highly perceived by the students as contributing to their perceived skills. They were also highly perceived as great learning tools. Additionally, the projects with engineering content (client based and non-client based) provided a significantly higher perceived motivation to learn. However, there was no significant difference in the exam performance.