Findings for flexible digital model (MFD) courses to enhance women participation in industrial and systems engineering courses

ABSTRACT

Digital education has reached enormous advances and acceptance in the last decade. COVID 19 has triggered a boom in the digital education implementation. Those courses that never had been delivered in a digital format, suddenly were forced to be prepared and presented as digital education. The nature of different courses might facilitate this new reality, depending if they are theoretical, numerical or mixed. This paper has evaluated a set of characteristics deployed in different engineering courses transformed into digital courses, depending on its nature. On the other hand, this analysis had a focus on the women participation in engineering courses and their evaluations of such digital course's characteristics. The main purpose of the present paper is to answer the question of what characteristics within the course methodology design, works and are evaluated better by students. A survey was designed and applied to the 87% of the Industrial and Systems Engineering program population in Tecnologico de Monterrey, Sonora Mexico. Data was statistically analyzed to find if there were any difference between female and male opinions about the course characteristics and within each gender in each kind of course. Also, a correlation analysis was made to identify how the elements influenced each other and if they should be combined depending on the desired result. An additional analysis took place to identify the level of participation of female and male students before and during pandemic time. Findings reveal interesting coincidences and differences in evaluating some of those digital course's characteristics depending on the gender of students and course nature, such as women participation and the differences in perception of competitiveness among women and men. Some of these findings are 1) In mixed subjects, male students identify a higher academic environment that encourages more competitiveness than female students. 2) Another finding is that men seem to have greater motivation to attend class sessions in numerical subjects. 3) Among female students a negative correlation between the frequency of the instructor request of a final reflection analysis of the session with considering a competitiveness academic environment. 4) Talking about mixed courses, all female students evaluated with the highest score in the question about motivation to be present in the session and the identification of moments and activities that allowed them to share opinions. To reinforce women participation in Industrial and Systems Engineering digital courses, those identified characteristics shall be included and developed in the course methodology design. © 2021 IEEE.