A Comparative Analysis of Students' Evaluations of Online and Offline Capstone Design Course

The College of engineering's capstone design is student-team-centred learning based on project-based learning and is one of the most important courses for students aiming to be competent professional engineers capable of solving real industrial problems. Therefore, in order to resolve the capstone problems, various face-to-face contacts such as frequent industrial site visits, multiple meetings with diverse people including team members, and repeated contacts with course-supervising and team-advising professors are prerequisite processes. However, according to the transition to fully online education due to the global pandemic of COVID-19, capstone design courses for 2020 and 2021 were also conducted online. Based on the modified students' evaluations of educational quality (SEEQ) with 3 perspectives such as curriculum, teaching-staff and students themselves, this study compares their evaluations of offline capstone designs from 2013 to 2019 and online capstone designs in 2020 and 2021 in the context of COVID-19. In 3 perspectives, the difference in students' evaluation of the online capstone between the beginning and the end of the course shows a positive effect, which is better than the offline capstone. Also, in various dimensions for each perspective, the online capstone shows a better evaluation than the offline capstone. These findings suggest that the online capstone design curriculum can be expected to have educational effects as well as students' satisfaction with the online curriculum in the future.