Distance learners receive quality education via Internet

Professor Harry Steudel (15K JPG)

"Hello, and welcome to our course on quality engineering and quality management. My name is Harry Steudel. The focus of this course is on increasing the competitiveness of an organization. We are going to look at various concepts, tools and techniques to improve ... "

And so Professor Harry Steudel begins another semester of class. The difference, however, is that there is no physical classroom and his students are scattered around the world.

Steudel's course, "Quality Engineering and Quality Management," is delivered via the Internet. In the course, he covers the fundamentals of quality improvement, management and planning tools, quality management systems, and statistical techniques. The course finishes with final projects and project presentations.

It is one of eight required courses, and one of two courses in the final semester of the college's Master of Engineering in Professional Practice (MEPP) degree. UW-Madison's first complete online graduate degree, MEPP is an alternative to a master's of business administration for engineers. The degree is designed for early to mid-career engineers who are planning to continue working in a technical capacity and want to improve their professional skills. These students all work full time and have between four and 30 years of engineering experience.

Two to three times per week, they view Steudel's lectures in Microsoft PowerPoint on CD, then "attend" class during a biweekly one-hour teleconference, during which they're also logged on to a special course website. There, they access course information and tools (E-mail, a bulletin board, a discussion forum and a calendar) through a password-protected portal called MEPP Central. Throughout the conference calls and during their often-daily visits to the web "classroom," Steudel and his students can use the tools to enable them to ask questions, engage in discussions and share information in real time. Those who don't have the lecture CDs handy also can view them at the course site using a streaming-video software called RealPlayer.

And just like most courses, there is homework and grading. Students' weekly assignments range from considering a question and posting comments on the discussion forum to applying what they learned in lecture to their final project and submitting the results via E-mail. For their final projects, students lead a team at their workplace in a practical application of the quality-improvement tools they've learned. Online discussions give them opportunity to collaboratively learn from leading their co-workers through the challenges of improving a real-world process. "And since these students are engineers in responsible positions with world-class corporations and organizations, the projects are valuable efforts for both students and their employers," says Steudel.

At the course's end, students present their projects on the Internet, using a web conferencing software called PlaceWare to post and control their PowerPoint files online. Simultaneously, the class has a teleconference. "Someone will have 10 or 12 minutes to present their slides," says Steudel. "They'll be talking and flipping through them on the Internet software and it's just like you're in a classroom."

After piloting the course to seven practicing engineers in the fall 2000 semester and teaching it to MEPP students this spring, Steudel is old hat at this new medium. But just two years ago, when he began planning the course, he was completely in the dark. "It was a challenge," he says. "If I was going to be a professor and teacher in the 21st century, I felt that I wanted to be comfortable with some of the technology."

He quickly learned there is more to developing an Internet course than meets the eye. After he completed his initial course proposal, Steudel spent about 15 months gathering course materials; creating PowerPoint lectures; and writing, recording and embedding files of narrated scripts in the lectures. "In some cases, it takes between three and four hours to develop a 15- to 18-minute narrated lecture," he says. "I never spent so much time preparing a course as this one."

The experience has taught Steudel a number of lessons. He learned how to prepare a course completely up front. He learned the mechanics of how to teach on the Internet.

And he learned that teaching without looking at a classroom full of faces isn't so difficult after all. "It turns out to be not that big a factor," he says. "It's just like communicating with someone through E-mail. You just talk to them. It's still personal."

For more information about the MEPP program, visit epdweb.engr.wisc.edu/mepp.