Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Paul Jensen
Sept 2006
Realizing that the “financial aspects of engineering projects” is important and that “engineering economics might not be as appealing to a technical thinker and therefore not a favorite course to teach” ME retired professor, Paul Jensen has put forth a concerted effort to create an online version of ME’s required engineering economics course, now called Engineering Finance. Such an undertaking has been a long time coming and began years ago when Dr. Jensen began to publish class notes into a workbook. This workbook was used by others who teach this class and given that he has invested a lot of energy into developing these materials, it was a fairly natural transition to create a Web-based class.
What inspired a professor who has been at UT since 1967 to spend considerable time and effort to develop an online version of his course? Also, bear in mind, that Dr. Jensen has been fully retired for three years. Perhaps it can be summed up by, “I like to teach this course…it is a very important subject.” His online course version (development was funded by Project PRoCEED) is a legacy course that it will be available for others in the department to use and modify when they teach this class. The course is indepth and rich with Web-related resources including student exercises, mini-lectures, and readings. Intensive course development began in the spring of 2006 and as Dr. Jensen notes, “…expect to spend a lot more time than you are paid for.” Last fall was demanding for there were still materials to be put online while conducting ongoing teaching to the 20 online and 60 face-to-face students. Student surveys found that they liked the online version as well as the traditional one, but given that the online version is resource intense, he had hoped they would have indicated a stronger preference for it. This fall there are 103 students in six sections that is fully online and follows a standard course calendar. Students go online via Blackboard (provides the course template with links to the fully developed course site) and they meet each week in the computer lab for a learning activity. Additionally, all exams are taken in the proctored computer lab.
While it is an undertaking to transition a course to the Web, Dr. Jensen saw instructional benefits. As he was creating the structure of the lessons, he wanted consistency among course components. This development process prompted him to really think about instructional goals and as consequence, the materials are better integrated. A thought question he has for others contemplating Web-based course is, “How much content can you include in an online course?” Online courses, just like the rest of the Web, can suffer from information saturation and it can be easy to overload students. He is using his tried and true lecture schedule as a guide and is also gathering student input in order to keep the content manageable.
When it comes to Web development skills, Dr. Jensen must have a natural propensity for he is well-versed in Dreamweaver and other computer skills. Even though this course deveopment has manily been his endeavor, he came to the FIC for technical help with Flash simulations and audio recordings. Just because he was a very independent developer, the FIC doesn’t anticipate most faculty will be as self-suficient when it comes to online materials so please come our way when you begin this type of an endeavor.