This paper presents a teaching innovation of introducing screencasts into Civil Engineering classroom instruction to improve learning outcomes for students, including those with hearing disabilities. Screencasts are screen captures of learning materials, broken into detailed steps with narration and synchronized captions provided by an instructor. With screencasts, students are able to follow the instructor’s elaboration of the problem step-by-step to understand the underlying principles. Our screencasts approach is targeted at upper level technical courses in Civil Engineering and focuses on an inclusive Civil Engineering classroom with deaf students. A bank of thirty eight screencasts was developed in 2012 and has been applied to supplement a Civil Engineering undergraduate core course: Structural Analysis. The screencasts are posted on the instructor’s teaching website, and are open to all students and interpreters participating in this course. The final calculated grades of the hearing students and the deaf students were collected for five consecutive academic years from 2011 to 2015. The grades of the hearing students and the deaf students were analyzed and compared before and after the screencasts were introduced. Another comparable Civil Engineering course without screencasts, Elementary Structures, was selected as a benchmark to evaluate the effects of screencasts on students’ learning. Surveys were performed to gather students’ feedback about their experience in using screencasts. The research results show that implementing screencasts to supplement traditional Civil Engineering lectures may enhance both deaf and hearing students’ learning effectiveness.
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