The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educators around the world to move to distance learning and adapt their face-to-face teaching styles to accommodate social distancing. While such activities as lectures are easier to deliver at a distance, teaching practical engineering skills in this way is an enormous challenge.
At MEE we are committed to delivering top-quality practical engineering teaching, and so we invested a lot of time and effort into designing and developing new methods of delivering interactive activities at a distance. In the 2020/2021 academic year, which may well become to be known as the year of the pandemic, we have used 5 distinct teaching methods:
in-lab, which was face-to-face with the support of teachers, technicians and graduate teaching assistants, but with strict social distancing restrictions mandating greatly reduced capacity, with students working individually, and staff only providing support from a 2m distance
take-home kits, which were collated by staff and either picked up by students or sent to them (sometimes halfway round the world), which allowed students to complete activities such as building and controlling a robot arm using an Arduino at home
remote access to real in-lab equipment (such as oscilloscopes, waveform generators, servo motors and HVAC systems) with web interfaces and/or cameras so that students could see the real-time operation of the systems they controlled from home
simulations of physical systems performed by the students at home (using, for example, LTSpice, TinkerCAD, MATLAB, LabVIEW) - these were either individual or in a group, which made a large difference to student experience
recorded/live video demonstrations of experiments, which students could watch at home - these were usually followed by analysis of provided data and a quiz to check students’ understanding of the material
The decision as to which of the activities would be delivered by which method was based on the original activity learning outcomes, safety considerations, as well as the availability of the required hardware and software. For example, one of the main learning outcomes of the mechatronics course was for the students to be able to build and control systems themselves from scratch. Such an exercise could only be properly carried out in a laboratory or by using a specially prepared take-home kit. Since the equipment required was low-cost and low-voltage, powered by an Arduino, there were no inherent barriers for students to perform these experiments safely at home. This freed up the limited lab time and space for other activities, such as soldering or high voltage transformer experiments, to happen in a safe environment in the presence of experienced staff.
Examples of remote access laboratory sessions are practical activities involving time and frequency domain analysis of servo motor control. These activities utilize in-house LabVIEW programmes connected to a DC motor with position sensors, which were easily adapted to enable remote access to the laboratory equipment.
Anonymous Questionnaire
To gain insight into the student experience of all these teaching methods we created an anonymous online questionnaire using Google forms, which students were encouraged to complete following 20 disparate practical activities in the robotics, electronic, electrical, and control engineering fields. Just during the Autumn semester (which was the first time ever we delivered our teaching using such a variety of methods) we received over 250 responses from first- and second- year undergraduates in programmes such as Mechanical, General, Aerospace, Electrical and Electronic, and Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.
The questionnaire asked a few contextual questions, such as year of study and whether English is their first language, but the majority of the questions were on a Likert scale of:
Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
These questions were designed to assess the students’ experience during the activity, including their enjoyment, whether they felt challenged, and whether they felt their practical skills had been enhanced thanks to the activity. In addition, some questions explored their time management skills, preference for future practical teaching delivery methods, and their ability to experiment further beyond the provided structured activities. There were also several open-ended free-text questions for students to provide detailed comments about anything they particularly liked, or thought could be improved, about the activities.
Outcomes
After analysing student responses we have managed to formulate a set of recommendations for practical engineering during the pandemic, as well as in the future:
Take-home kits, remote access and individual simulation activities all appeared to be enjoyed by the students, while being challenging and effective in teaching them new practical skills. These three distance delivery methods received a comparable level of appreciation by the students to the in-lab activities and are, therefore, strongly recommended for distance learning of practical engineering skills when circumstances demand it.
Video/quiz activities have not proven satisfactory, and group simulation activities have scored the lowest on all criteria, and hence both of these methods should be avoided if possible, especially for first year teaching.
If difficult choices need to be made with regards to prioritising limited in-lab access, Year 1 students who are less familiar with the equipment, experimentation and time-management skills should be prioritised over Year 2 students who already have some experience of this.
Short video demonstrations could be used to enhance the experience of non-native English speakers during take-home kits activities.
Some of the take-home kit activities have been a great success, with over 80% of the students preferring to complete these activities at home in the future, rather than attending in-lab sessions. This unexpected outcome, precipitated by the constraints of the pandemic, could lead to enhancing student experience beyond the current circumstances, by incorporating take-home kits activities to the long-term delivery of the curriculum alongside in-person teaching.
Research Output
This work was presented at the IEEE EDUCON 2021 Global Engineering Education Conference, and the full paper can be found here.
This 8-minute video summarizes some of our key results:
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