Experience with teaching digital design online

Advances in technology have created unique opportunities for teaching digital design courses. Students in such courses no longer need to be present in the laboratory in order to obtain practical hands on experience and master the course material as students can complete laboratory assignments at home using relatively inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf development platforms and free software design tools. This paper describes an experience with porting and teaching a hardware-based digital design course to a 100% online course. Assessment data indicate that students who took the course online performed at least as well students in the traditional face-to-face course. We conclude that a fully-online hardware digital design course creates new and effective opportunities for students around the globe to obtain access to a hands-on engineering education.