ABSTRACT

The University of South Australia has been delivering fully online and blended engineering programs to undergraduates since 2011. This endeavor has brought much change – at the organizational level in the refocusing of courses and programs, at the staff level in their approaches to teaching, and at the students’ level in their approaches and engagement with online and blended learning environments, and with the materials themselves. In this chapter we consider the process of transition within this changing system. We provide working definitions of online and blended engineering and explain how it is distinctly different from what happens in face-to-face teaching. As such, materials, staff and students need to transition to new ways of teaching and learning. Examples of how to systematically support this transition are explicated using two case studies that show the centrality of the time budget for making necessary changes for staff, students and materials to new modes of delivery. Throughout any such transition process that impacts on others, the goal must always be ‘primum non nocere,’ to do no harm. Engineers have always used technology to support their endeavors – why should teaching be any different?