Hyflex for Successful Student Veteran Engineering Education:  Say it Like You Mean It

Robert Rabb; Alyson Eggleston; Ronald Welch

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: Military and Veterans Division Technical Session 1
Page Count: 13
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--40568
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/40568
Download Count: 351

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Paper Authors

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Robert Rabb The Citadel

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Professor, Mechanical Engineering, The Citadel

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Ronald Welch The Citadel

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Ronald W. Welch, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, F.ASEE, F.SAME
Professor of Civil Engineering

Ron Welch received his B.S. degree in Engineering Mechanics from the United States Military Academy in 1982. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1990 and 1999, respectively. He was Dean of the School of Engineering at The Citadel from 1 July 2011- 30 June 2021. He is currently Professor of Civil Engineering at The Citadel after completing a sabbatical. Prior to his current position, he was the Department Head of Civil Engineering at The University of Texas at Tyler from Jan 2007 to June 2011 as well as served in the Army Corps of Engineers for over 24 years including eleven years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy where he retired as a Colonel.

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Alyson Eggleston The Citadel

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Dr. Alyson Eggleston is a cognitive linguist specializing in the impact our speech has on the way we think and solve problems. She is the founding Director of Technical Communication at The Citadel, and has developed a project-based technical communication course that serves over 14 STEM majors and several degree programs in the social sciences. She is also acting Residential Fellow for the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching, Learning, and Distance Education, and in this role regularly mentors faculty and facilitates workshops on instructional design, Quality Matters assessments, and novel edtech applications. She is also the acting liaison for the Office of Institutional Assessment and Accreditation, and creates online assessment resources and facilitates webinars and workshops to all levels of administration and faculty to demonstrate how to leverage assessment data in service to continuous programmatic improvement and resource acquisition. Her research interests include STEM communications pedagogy, cognitive empathy, industry-academia interaction, teaching and learning.

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Abstract

There has been increased attention on producing engineers that are technically proficient while having many professional skills such as organization, time management, communication, and leadership. Across organization types, especially academia, veterans are admired by their peers for their professionalism and communication skills. Student veterans have trained and taken online classes in diverse and remote environments. They are accustomed to learning under ideal and less than ideal circumstances. The combined traits of increased professionalization, prior experience with online learning, and persistence position student veterans to perform as well or better than their traditional college-aged peers during the COVID-19 crisis. In a study of the effectiveness of Hyflex (Hybrid Flexible) learning conducted in the School of Engineering at The Citadel, forced-choice and free text survey responses showed that student veterans match with and differ from traditional college-aged students in important ways. Results from this study can be used to guide best practices in the Hyflex educational model, in order to better serve the student veteran demographic and all students. In particular, student veteran responses coalesce around a focus on effectiveness and time management concerns, as many have families and other external obligations. As a result, student veterans simultaneously want more Hyflex educational options going forward, however they want Hyflex implementation strategies to be refined and executed better in the future with more long-term planning.

Active duty and student veterans can serve vital roles in the engineering classroom, modeling appropriate communication strategies for traditional students as well as connecting their global knowledge with the course content, enriching all students’ understanding. Faculty and traditional students can benefit from this unique demographic if they are aware of their skills and experiences. This paper presents some of the issues and concerns of active duty and veterans pursuing an engineering degree compared to their traditional student counterparts when institutions pivot to alternative instructional delivery, specifically Hyflex.

Citation
Format

Rabb, R., & Welch, R., & Eggleston, A. (2022, August), Hyflex for Successful Student Veteran Engineering Education: Say it Like You Mean It Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40568

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - There has been increased attention on producing engineers that are technically proficient while having many professional skills such as organization, time management, communication, and leadership. Across organization types, especially academia, veterans are admired by their peers for their professionalism and communication skills. Student veterans have trained and taken online classes in diverse and remote environments. They are accustomed to learning under ideal and less than ideal circumstances. The combined traits of increased professionalization, prior experience with online learning, and persistence position student veterans to perform as well or better than their traditional college-aged peers during the COVID-19 crisis. In a study of the effectiveness of Hyflex (Hybrid Flexible) learning conducted in the School of Engineering at The Citadel, forced-choice and free text survey responses showed that student veterans match with and differ from traditional college-aged students in important ways. Results from this study can be used to guide best practices in the Hyflex educational model, in order to better serve the student veteran demographic and all students. In particular, student veteran responses coalesce around a focus on effectiveness and time management concerns, as many have families and other external obligations. As a result, student veterans simultaneously want more Hyflex educational options going forward, however they want Hyflex implementation strategies to be refined and executed better in the future with more long-term planning.

Active duty and student veterans can serve vital roles in the engineering classroom, modeling appropriate communication strategies for traditional students as well as connecting their global knowledge with the course content, enriching all students’ understanding. Faculty and traditional students can benefit from this unique demographic if they are aware of their skills and experiences. This paper presents some of the issues and concerns of active duty and veterans pursuing an engineering degree compared to their traditional student counterparts when institutions pivot to alternative instructional delivery, specifically Hyflex.

AU  - Robert Rabb
AU  - Ronald Welch
AU  - Alyson Eggleston
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Hyflex for Successful Student Veteran Engineering Education:  Say it Like You Mean It
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/40568
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--40568
ER  -