Student-Centered Engineering Education: The Renewable Energy Case

The emergence of information and communication technologies has paved the way for new online teaching methodologies to spread widely in recent years. Students have consequently moved into the heart of the learning process while instructors have acquired the role of facilitators in a new paradigm centered on students. Student-centered learning has therefore manifested itself as an opportunity for higher education institutions; particularly in developing countries, to meet many of the challenges posed by an increasingly changing landscape.A new renewable energy online course is described as a pilot to support the concept of student-centered learning at Hashemite University. Students in this course utilize study guides as the backbone of course delivery and implementation, interact with and navigate content, read and/or listen to explanation, watch videos, answer questions, uncover answers interactively. Several types of assessment tools are arranged weekly to ensure continuous monitoring and follow up. Three tools are utilized in order to evaluate the effectiveness and the quality of the course, including pre-survey, satisfaction survey and grades analysis. The correlation between students’ grades and grade point average is then revealed to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of course delivery and comprehension as well as the concept of student-centered learning. The results support the idea that online student-centered learning is promising in higher education institutions in Jordan, although there is still a great debate in the literature on its effectiveness.