Redefining Learning Anytime, Anywhere

We had this idea of expanding access to engineering education … opening up doors to new students, new opportunities…which has truly grown beyond my expectations…I Can't believe it's been five years.

[What are some notable achievements of Penn Engineering Online so far?]

[Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean] The biggest accomplishment is that we managed to create an online degree program of the same quality as the on-campus degree program, attracting the same caliber of students, having full-time faculty teach those students, and then at the end of the day, offer them a degree, a certificate, a diploma that is as valuable as the on-campus equivalent.

[Chris Callison-Burch, Associate Professor CIS] The thing that stands out to me the most is just the ability to have impact on so many people's lives. The number of students that I've been able to interact with through this program is truly stunning.

[How has the online community at Penn evolved over the last 5 years?] 

[Olivia Roth, Director of Online Academic Programs at Penn Engineering Online] In the beginning, there wasn't a lot of students at the time, so it was kind of quiet in the chat rooms. Fast forward to today, and we have over 2000 students in that same Slack workspace, and most of the time when a student asks a question, another student will jump in and answer it. So to witness that evolution has been really fulfilling.

[Susan Davidson, Weiss Professor CIS] But we've also developed a completely new program. So the online data science program now expects people to know computer science so that they can then start expanding into more of the data analytics. So I think it's not just the courses, but in the degree programs that we're offering, that you can see the evolution and the mission of the school being expressed.

[What makes Penn Engineering Online unique?]

[Rebecca Hayward, Executive Director of Penn Engineering Online] One of the most unique things about our program is that we really wanted to focus on access. We wanted to make sure that students who could never leave their jobs, who could never leave where they live and come and study at Penn, had an opportunity to interact with our world renowned professors and to really make sure that they could get the education they deserved.

[Zack Ives, Department Chair, Adani President’s Distinguished Professor CIS] One of the exciting things that we've done in recent years is get various folks at Google, at Amazon, at Meta and various other companies to give us a lot of input and even take an active instructional role in some of the cloud computing type courses, and a variety of others that are emerging down the pipeline, are all based on interactions with industry and industry leaders.

[How does Penn Engineering Online align with the school’s greater commitment to education excellence?]

[Rebecca Hayward] When we started this program, we knew that the quality had to be absolutely the exact same extremely high quality experience that they would have on campus. 

[Melissa Amaya, MCIT ‘22]  My Time at Penn Engineering online overall, um, provided me the confidence to feel like I can go into any interview and rock it.

[Tom Farmer, Senior Lecturer CIS and ESE] We're blessed to have a gifted faculty group that I work with. They are just tremendous. They're always involved in conferences. They're doing ongoing research at all times. They're working with industry to, you know, create some new solutions or uncover new science but we also receive incredible amounts of feedback from students because they know what they're after, but they also see the trends that are coming. And so they feed that back into the program saying, "Hey, do you have any courses on this?" And it inspires us to say, "Yeah, and we always wanted to create that course. We're glad you want it."

[What are your hopes and aspirations for the future of Penn Engineering Online?]

[Richard Forman, Chair for  the Board of Online Engineering Education] We've been incredibly pleased and satisfied with what we've done today, but this really is just the beginning and we've really only scratched the surface of what we can deliver online.

[Boon Thau Loo, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs]  It forces us to rethink the old way of doing things and to do things in a much better way. If I were to hibernate and wake up 50 years from now, I envision a very different landscape, in learning and teaching.  We are going to look back and wonder why did people teach it in the old way 50 years ago?

[Susan Davidson] We will always recognize the new challenges and we will develop content to show how those challenges are being addressed.

[Vijay Kumar] Right now, online is approximately one third of the entire student body. We're imagining a world where on-campus Penn Engineering students are roughly the same as the online Penn Engineering students. So you might imagine growing to a point where we're about 50% equal. The distinction between online and on-campus is blurred.

[Olivia Roth] This is an initiative that started from the seed of an idea that has grown to such an incredible community of students and staff, and I am really honored to be a part of it.