Opportunities and Challenges with E-Learning Courses in Statistics for Engineering and Computer Science Students

Teaching a basic statistics course to engineering and computer science students is often a difficult task, confronted with many obstacles ranging from lack of prior knowledge in mathematics through covering a lot of topics in a short time to students showing a complete disinterest in the subject. In this paper, we show that an e-learning course in statistics on the one hand can offer opportunities to reduce many of the problems occurring in the corresponding face-to-face taught course, but on the other hand sometimes introduces new challenges. Furthermore, we compare the teaching situation in an e-learning course in statistics in an engineering program taught completely online with the findings in an e-learning statistics course taught as the only e-learning course in the curriculum.