Final Paper pdf 200KB

Students’ Grasp of Thermodynamics In Online Course

During the fall semester of 2020, Thermodynamics I was taught online at North Carolina State University due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is the first thermal/fluids course that students take in the Mechanical and Aerospace Department and has a reputation of being challenging. During the semester, students were regularly asked to rate how well they understood the material being taught and to predict their next test grade based on that understanding. These results are used to determine when students struggle with the material when learning in an online environment. Analysis shows that students consistently felt that they understood the material fairly well regardless of the difficulty of the topics or previous test average.