Remote Practicals - A Do-It-Yourself Workshop

Providing practical experiences remotely is a hot topic for webinars and workshops in engineering education, as most institutions prepare to deliver a mixture of in-lab and remote lab and workshop sessions. Our department moved rapidly to transfer hundreds of practical sessions online in the first half of 2020; now that we have had time to pause and reflect, we are ready to share what we have learned so far and how we're planning for the new term.

On 1st July 2020, Dr Andrew Garrard and I were invited to City, University of London to deliver a workshop on creating remote practicals for engineering. We aimed to not just lecture and describe how we approached the challenge, but enable the attendees to follow our thought processes by reflecting on their own teaching practice. A video capture of this workshop is posted below.

The first half of the workshop introduced a framework for learning outcomes from all practical experiences. Ensuring that every lab session has a clear set of learning outcomes is crucial. By categorising these outcomes into a common language, we can chart the progress of engineering students' practical education. The learning outcomes can be clearly communicated to both staff and students, and used to determine what should still be taught by remote activities. Our workshop asked City to determine the main outcomes that their students should learn, just like our framework at Sheffield, below.

The second half of the workshop considered how some of these outcomes could still be delivered remotely. Activities such as videos, simulations and live interactive sessions can all teach practical skills, but the activity must be aligned with the session learning outcomes. MEE have codified six possible tactics to deliver our remote practicals, shown below. Our workshop allowed City staff to consider the best tactics to deliver the learning outcomes that are important for their courses.

Thanks to Dom, Sandra, Taqveem and all of the team at City that helped us put the event together, it was a great success.

If you would like us to run a workshop with your institution, or you have a different approach to remote practicals to share with us, we'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment below, or get in touch with a.funnell@sheffield.ac.uk.