Abstract: In the current paper we share our six years of experience and examine an integrated contact- and e- learning course in managerial psychology for engineering students. To better understand the effectiveness of combining various didactic methods, including e-learning, the engineering students’ (N=796) feedback on the course was analyzed. Our study focuses on the face-to-face lecture and the e-lecture, employing either the digital teaching tools on CD-ROMs or web-based e-lectures. We failed to find any statistically significant difference between these two types of lectures in the students’ assessment. The analysis of the feedback suggests that the engineering students generally have a highly positive attitude towards integrating contact- and e-learning courses. The findings indicate that successful e-learning takes place within a complex system involving various didactical methods of teaching. I. INTRODUCTION E-learning E-learning is used as an umbrella term to refer to computer- enhanced learning. It may include the use of web-based teaching materials and hypermedia in general, multimedia CD- ROMs or web sites, discussion boards, e-mailing, computer aided assessments, simulations, games etc, with possibly a combination of various methods. Especially in higher education, there is an increasing tendency towards employing e-learning - the explosive rate of growth, now about 25 per cent a year, has made e-learning one of the most popular and widely used learning methods in universities worldwide. By 2003, more than 1.9 million students were participating in online learning at institutions of higher education in the USA according to a report of the Sloan Consortium [22], an authoritative source of information about online higher education. It is a common understanding [7, 23] that the advantages of e-learning include flexibility and greater adaptability to the learner's needs. On the other hand, the most often listed critical disadvantage of e-learning is lack of human interaction as the lecturer is cut out from the teaching process. Lecture and e-lecture A lecture is an oral presentation given, for example, by an academic aimed at teaching students a particular subject. It has been maintained and also supported by prominent researchers [3, 4] that such a didactic method as lecturing is not the most effective teaching method. Though lectures are much criticized, universities have not yet found practical alternative teaching methods for the large majority of their courses. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history, background, theories and equations. Many authors have noted that the method of lecturing is justified if the objective is to present a difficult to obtain or difficult to systematise material to large groups of students [4, 5]. Critics point out that lecturing is mainly a method of one-way communication that does not involve significant audience participation. Therefore, Bligh argues [2] that lecturing "represent a conception of education in which teachers who know give knowledge to students who do not and are therefore supposed to have nothing worth contributing." Based on his review of numerous studies, he concludes that lecturing is not more effective or less effective than any other teaching method intended for disseminating information. The e-lecture is a lecture delivered via electronic mail to networked individual computers. Usually, the lecturer stands in a room and gives information relevant to the lecture's content. In case of the e-lecture, we move the ordinary lecturing situation to the web environment simulating a real face-to-face lecture as naturally as possible. The digital teaching tool can be an interactive course module or an interactive part of a course containing pictures, videos, animations or discussion boards. In our course, the digital teaching tool was a special unit of a specific topic and included e-lectures (video-based lectures); the slides used during the lectures and teaching materials for students were also added to the tool. Each digital teaching tool was saved on a CD-ROM; it covered a specific topic of the course. On the other hand, each unit of the digital teaching tools was a part of a managerial psychology course as well. In 2000, we decided that it was an appropriate name for our work because it was a material object (CD-ROMs) as well as a tool for digital or virtual teaching. In the very first year of this century, we did not know much about the positive or negative outcomes of e-learning. There was already some expertise at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first attempts at introducing such teaching tools were made at several European universities, but there was no really serious research in the method itself. Moreover, there was not much knowledge about how to adapt pedagogical and Integrated Contact- and E-learning Course in Managerial Psychology for Engineering Students Jüri Ilvest Jr. PE Consult Ltd., Estonia jyrijr@pekosult.ee Mare Teichmann Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia M. Iskander (ed.), Innovations in E-learning, Instruction Technology, Assessment, and Engineering Education, © 2007 Springer. 243–247. 243