Starting in the fall semester of 2013, the Engineering and Technical Science Department will be offering online courses of  Wind tunnel simulator, in two of the required classes for any engineering degree, dynamics and statics.

The courses are pilot courses with the intent of offering more online classes in the future. Faculty members have been working on gaining online classes for the past year. There will be as little difference between an online class and an on campus class as possible.

“Part of what we want to do is still keep the learning environment unique and small like it is at WT,” Dr. Emily Hunt, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering, said. “We don’t want to lose the strong things about our engineering program which is that you get a lot of one on one time with your faculty. We don’t want to lose that just because we are going online. ”

These two courses will be the first online engineering classes offered at WTAMU. They are unique to the campus because no other university across the country offers these specific classes online.

“Most of them are upper level classes or graduate classes. They also do some specialty topics but it’s just not common to have such general core engineering classes taught online,” Hunt said.  “Engineering is such a hands on field and problem solving is really what you are learning to do and that’s difficult to teach when you are not face to face, but we are going to be using new technology that allows us to be face to face with the students if we need to be and actually show them how to solve problems in an online format.”

Professors of the classes are expecting off campus interest to be high and to increase student enrollment in the engineering program.

“We anticipate offering this online at least once a year. We anticipate the off campus interest to be high such that the demand will drive the need for the classes,” Matt Jackson, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering, said. “Most other institutions to date are putting their information based classes online but the problems based classes are starting to become available.”

The engineering program also offers a summer camp open to youth ages 12-18. The camp involves hands on projects like robot building and will also have guest speakers.

“What we are trying to do with that camp is just get them introduced to the discipline of engineering,” Matthew Whigham, instructor of Mechanical Engineering, said. “We are going to have different sessions where the students will go and learn about different topics. We are also going to have a design project where the students will design little robots. We want to give them a hands on project.”

The camp will take place June 9-14. Housing will be available to students who do not live close enough to commute daily. Meals will be provided and the students will get to experience eating in the cafeteria on campus. WT students will be assisting in the camp and Upward Bound students will also be in attendance.

“We like to keep them pretty busy. We like to introduce those kids to engineering because a lot of them don’t even know what an engineer does,” Whigham said. “There’s a lot of help that goes into these camps. We’ll recruit WT students to help us out.”

The summer camp is serving as the department’s outreach program as of now.

“I do think it is a good way to get kids going in that direction. I think that there is a decrease in students entering the engineering program because they see it as a more difficult degree to get,” Jesi Warrick, senior Engineering Technology major, said.