Track: Global Engineering Education*

Abstract

The availability of high-speed internet systems and more advanced digital mediums provided better opportunities for transforming knowledge and aiding teaching and learning over the past decade. Academic institutions have been encouraging and incentivizing their faculty to collaborate with the technical staff to utilize digital technology in the classrooms and to report and present their challenges. With the arrival of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, institutions rushed to use digital mediums to transform their delivery methods from face-to-face or in-person to synchronous or asynchronous, depending on the institution's readiness. Texas A&M University and one of its two satellite campuses in Qatar adopted the same policy. Texas A&M University is one of the few universities successfully establishing an international campus. The Qatar campus started its operation in the fall of 2002. Since its inception, the campus has offered four ABET-accredited engineering programs in chemical, electrical, mechanical, and petroleum engineering, and by May 2922, over 1,200 received engineering degrees. The campus has consistently been well regarded for its innovative approaches to teaching and learning methods in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA Region).  This article presents the results of an empirical study conducted at Texas A&M University in Qatar and Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, in two undergraduate courses taught on these two campuses. This study also compared students' participation and academic performance during remote in-class (synchronous) and face-to-face learning.