Effect Analysis of Online and Offline Cognitive Internships Based on the Background of Engineering Education Accreditation

The Engineering Education Accreditation (EEA) has been adopted in colleges and universities worldwide. As a foundational component of practical teaching, cognitive internship is a focus of EEA, with the offline mode as the common teaching method, while the online mode has been increasingly used in recent years. To meet the requirements of EEA, the effects of the online and offline cognitive internships need to be analyzed and compared. Focusing on the demand, this paper proposes a comprehensive method combining the Goal Achievement Degree (GAD) and CIPP model. The majors of the School of Automotive Transport and Engineering at Wuhan University of Science and Technology (WUST), which include the fields of vehicle engineering, traffic engineering, traffic transport, and logistics engineering, are taken as the example to conduct this research. The main findings of this paper are as follows: (1) Compared with online cognitive internship, offline internship students have a stronger ability to enhance theoretical knowledge and perceive the environment. (2) Utilizing such an online teaching method could be helpful for cultivating students’ analytical skills. (3) From the students’ perspective, the lack of funding for teaching cognitive internships, both online and offline, is the most serious problem. (4) Students perceive that the online cognitive internship helps them to understand knowledge in class and determine career planning, but it does not provide the same effect on those as the offline cognitive internship.