Online Software Engineering Graduate Program Case Study: Significant Student Engagement and Career Impact

Abstract For online education, interactions between learners and instructors and learners' engagement are not easily achieved. The online education process, including organization and management, occurs differently than in conventional teaching. The paper provides insight into online education technologies and techniques for an engineering graduate program and how online learning has evolved using a case study. The article presents over 25 years of history of the case study program providing data results of alums, students, and faculty surveys across five years to answer three critical questions for Software Engineering learners. These three research questions address learning resource deployment, organization and management, and new learning and teaching activities. The results of the surveys revealed that ninety percent of learners strongly agree or agree that the Learning Management System (LMS) is great for their engagement with other learners and the instructor. Additionally, the results expressed student satisfaction with online admission, registration, and advising. The surveys identified that the impact of the online engineering graduate program in the case study on the learner included a job promotion and salary increase for most of the survey participants.