October 2002 — Features
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Partnerships Increase Access to Engineering Education: North Carolina's Two+Two Experience
By Catherine E. Brawner, Sarah A. Rajala, Thomas K. Miller III, Harish P. Cherukuri, Cheryl Alderman and Ronald K. Ingle
North Carolina State University (NC State), The University of NC at Charlotte (UNCC) and NC A&T State University (NC A&T) have the three colleges of engineering in the 16-campus University of NC system. These colleges of engineering provide access to engineering education throughout the state, including to those citizens in the more remote and less wealthy areas. For more than 20 years, NC State has partnered with The University of NC at Asheville (UNCA) in a Two+Two engineering program in which students take their first two years of general education at UNCA, and then transfer to NC State's College of Engineering for upper division courses and their degree.
In 1998, NC State began to offer UNCA students the lower division engineering courses through live distance education in lieu of site-based delivery by local, adjunct or traveling faculty members. Then in 1997, NC State proposed that the Two+Two program be expanded to include the University of NC at Wilmington and Lenoir Community College (LCC). With approval of the funding came a request from the legislature that NC State partner with UNCC and NCA&T in the implementation of the two new Two+Two engineering programs. These two sites began to offer the program in spring 2000.
Distance education supports the Two+Two programs in the larger disciplines, namely electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering and civil engineering. Courses offered include statistics, engineering dynamics, electric circuits, an introduction to logic design, and solid mechanics. Students interested in other disciplines, such as chemical engineering, complete their general education requirements during the first two years, and then transfer for all of their engineering coursework and the completion of their degree.
Virtual Classroom Model
Courses in the program are delivered using a virtual classroom model, which attempts to replicate a traditional classroom. This means that professors and students can interact during class and office hours. The original concept was to provide classes in an entirely synchronous mode. However, scheduling quirks - all campuses have different semester schedules - and natural disasters - Hurricane Floyd and its ensuing floods caused LCC to close for three weeks in 1999 - made us quickly realize the need to archive lectures for later delivery.
One of the goals of the Two+Two project is to make the teaching environment as natural as possible for the instructor. We use the SMART Board from SMART Technologies Inc., which is essentially a large touch-screen computer that appears as a whiteboard to students in the sending location, but the image that is transmitted to the remote location is of computer quality. We can also transmit images from a document camera or from on-screen presentations.
The technology used to deliver the live classes from NC State and NC A&T is based on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) H.
