Online Resources, Equity, and Ethics

Thursday, October 5, 2023
1:30 PM - 2:20 PM
Zoom

Presenters: Nazli Wodzinski, Ph.D., Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and Jeff Pribyl, Ph.D. Biochemistry, Chemistry, and Geology

In recent years, engineering program students have been using online resources such as YouTube, Khan Academy, Chegg, and Course Hero, for their gateway courses. Online resources can be used in various ways, such as getting help from online tutors, watching videos of solved examples, and theoretical content. These resources, unfortunately, also have been frequently used to obtain solutions for uploaded written assignments and exams. The majority of the online resources require a membership fee. If some students increase their success in gateway courses because they can afford these memberships, this ethical problem also creates an equity gap. In this project, via a survey that was filled out by former and current engineering students of Minnesota State University, Mankato, we examined how the online resources are used for the selected 2XX level courses. Our target respondents were students who took one or more of the Mechanics Series courses (ME 212 – Statics, ME 214 – Dynamics, and ME 223 – Mechanics of Materials) which are gateway courses for Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs. Along with being gateway courses, these classes also had DFW rates over 20% and opportunity gaps around 10% on average, based on institutional data collected within last three academic years. We aimed to determine if the widely used online resources are creating an opportunity gap as well as an ethical dilemma. While our target respondents were only limited to students of three courses, we believe that the outcomes of this study reflects the preferences of other gateway courses’ students. While online evaluation and assessment methods are becoming permanent in higher education, the results, discussions and suggestions that are provided in this paper will be instrumental for the restructuring of any course that has an online component.