Evaluation of graduate engineering education by television at Purdue university

The Schools of Engineering at Purdue University have an off-Lafayette campus graduate engineering education program in which televised instruction plays a major role. A Lafayette campus class is televised and distributed by a microwave network and/or by videotape to a variety of reception sites, including industrial locations and other campuses. Over fifteen hundred evaluations from sixty courses over eight semesters have been collected from Lafayette and off-Lafayette students. The evaluation data from all televised courses in a single semester are lumped together and then the data are sorted into Lafayette student responses and off-Lafayette student responses (referred to as all-TV student responses). The all-TV responses are then subdivided into TV-with-audio-talkback responses and TV-videotape responses. The data indicate that students do learn by televised instruction, that students prefer TV-with-audio-talkback over videotaped instruction, and that students prefer live instruction to either kind of televised instruction. Some TV reception classes were Staffed with persons paid by Lafayette to provide local class monitoring. The evaluation data from these classes were indistinguishable from the evaluation data from TV classes without paid class monitors.