Work-In-Progress: Addressing Student Attitudes and General Study Skills through a new hybrid distance learning model, or NHDLM

This paper is a "Work-in-Progress". The paper will describe efforts to impact first semester engineering student attitudes and basic study skills through the application of a new hybrid distance learning model, or NHDLM. The program tries to impact Native American students participating in a pre-engineering program while attending geographically widely separated Tribally Controlled Colleges, TCC's. The critical factor is not only the advancement of students along Bloom's taxonomy, from memorization to synthesis, in the particular engineering and basic sciences but it also includes the development of an intrinsic reward system leading to perseverance and adaptability within the environment not always controlled by the engineering-student. Compounding this challenge is the under resourced status of the students involved, that is to say many of the students started in a school system with resource problems. The application of NHDLM is a way to get across the fundamentals of engineering sciences to these students at locations that could not support the required resources. Although having some characteristics comparable to a YouTube podcast, this application adds interaction with direct communication, a dimension of personalization and relatively quick feedback. The utilization of NHDLM in this context, celebrates personal efforts while maintaining system wide standards and professional attainments. Opportunities and challenges for assessing efficacy of the model will be discussed