The College of Engineering is celebrating 25 years of offering distance courses through satellite delivery and then online. This year, the College will graduate 15 distance students in the Master of Engineering online management program, a degree that has been offered completely online since 2004—allowing students to work full time and earn their degree part time.

The same expert faculty teach the distance courses as teach on-campus."The online Master of Engineering allows us to expand our outreach by creating a global classroom," states Mike Riley, professor of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering.

Student credit hours for online courses generated by the College of Engineering have steadily increased over the past four years.

Click here to learn about the Master of Engineering in Engineering Management, and click here to learn about the Logistics Certificate.

Billie Strand, Program Specialist, and Sydney Brown, Instructional Design Technology Specialist, staff at Extended Education & Outreach, provide support to the faculty engaged in developing and teaching distance programs in the College of Engineering.

Sydney Brown says of her work as an EE&O Instructional Design Technology Specialist in the College of Engineering, “With both technological and pedagogical expertise, I help faculty design, develop, and deliver online courses to the extent they require my support. Sometimes that's as simple as helping someone learn to narrate a presentation or create an illustrative image. Other times, it can be as challenging as figuring out how to automate the creation of a several hundred-item test bank for online assessments."

EE&O Program Specialist, Billie Strand, explains, "The College of Engineering has a long history in delivering educational courses and programs at a distance. Extended Education & Outreach has partnered with COE to ensure that working professionals around the world have access to high-quality educational options."

Advanced Scholars

The Advanced Scholars program has again had another excellent start to the year with an in increasing in the number of high school partners, the number of students, and the number of course enrollment:

• 117 total applications from different 42 participating partner schools
• 112 active course enrollments from 102 students

EE&O continues working to increase the number of students from partnering high schools as well as building relationships with potential and future Advanced Scholars partner schools. Rhnissa Decker, the Program Coordinator for the Advanced Scholars program, will conduct Web seminars, Video presentations, high school visits and presentations in efforts to continue to increase partnership with UNL and the Advanced Scholars program. With Spring 2010 semester dates and deadlines drawing near, if you have any ideas of where Rhnissa may assist to draw interest to UNL or your particular program please feel free to contact her at rdecker2@unl.edu or 472-1131.

EE&O is again offering funds for the development of new distance courses. Priority will be given to courses that support an online UG degree completion option or UG certificate, approved graduate program, term-based X and College Independent Study courses. Proposals are due by October 16, 2009. For more information, please visit http://extended.unl.edu/faculty/newproposals/.

Have you ever wanted to develop your own Internet game? UNL's Independent Study High School now offers that knowledge to high school students through its newly released course "Internet Gaming."

This course is the result of a collaborative effort among Dr. Lisong Xu, assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, graduate student Miao Wang, and undergraduate student Michael Pfeiffer and members of EE&O’s instructional design team. Dr. Xu developed the course as part of a five-year Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation. A NSF CAREER grant supports junior faculty who exhibit responsibility as teacher-scholars in their research and who focus on the integration of education and research.