COVID-19 has shifted how the world gathers, communicates, and collaborates. Many industries have adopted new remote solutions to these unprecedented times. Engineering education has not been exempted from these challenges. Many campuses have gone online, challenging instructors to translate what is often a hands-on curriculum to a remote practice.
Early in the pandemic 1,102 colleges and universities across the United States closed, almost overnight. In the following months, that number would rise to over four thousand and impact almost 26 million students. Faced with these challenges, engineering schools have found many different creative solutions to leverage remote technologies.
One of the first steps was for engineering schools to move their educational environment online. But not all institutions were satisfied with just posting content online. Julie Steinbrenner, senior instructor and external relations chair at the University of Colorado Boulder, believed it would be important to engage students in a more meaningful way than screen time.
She explained to ASME, “I want to promote more self-learning and less lecturing. I’m reducing the number of times I meet with the students, giving them more independent work to do, and making myself available to help.”
To facilitate this, the college established relationships with engineering companies to foster student work opportunities. The companies would create entry-level assignments for students to complete. The company would retain the intellectual property, and the student would be graded on the work projects.
Translating the hands-on nature of lab assignments to an online environment has been a little more difficult, yet not impossible. For example, Douglas Van Citters, the associate dean of Dartmouth’s undergraduate engineering department, wanted to ensure students still benefited from experimental learning. He, like many people, believes learning through doing is essential to engineering education.
Van Citters told ASME, “We strive to put the students into the laboratory or a machine shop, to get their hands dirty and make things happen.” Without campus facilities, he was not sure how they could support this type of learning. He recalled, “I wasn’t quite sure how they would respond. But being around a bunch of engineers, everybody just rolled up their sleeves and said, ‘Let’s make it happen.’”
Their solution was to focus on finding ways to provide students with access to hardware and construction machines. This involved creating lab packages of inexpensive off-the-shelf engineering tools. If the students could not go to the lab, the lab would be mailed to them.
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The lab kits overcame some of the issues around equal access to technology, but there were still additional challenges to overcome. “Where we can somewhat democratize their access to technology, for instance, providing an internet connection, we will,” said Van Citters. “But we can’t guarantee that if they’re spread around the world. That has been eye-opening. We have sent cellphone minutes to students overseas just so that they could dial into class. We are doing our best to remove the barriers wherever we can.”
Before the pandemic, many colleges and organizations were working on online engineering labs to address the growing demand for online course options. Once the pandemic hit, these projects took on a bigger importance.
One such university was Purdue University. In 2017 they began creating online labs for structure and materials in aeronautics and astronautics. They later expanded their online labs to many other engineering courses. So, when they were forced to close campuses, they had some infrastructure in place to shift courses online.
“It's really saved us that we were already doing so much of that,” Mark Johnson, Electrical and Computer Engineering’s director of instructional laboratories, explained in a news release. “The pandemic forced us to do it at a scale that we hadn’t anticipated doing so quickly. We’re able to do almost everything we were able to do in person.”
Like the mail-out labs that Dartmouth offers, some of Purdue University’s lab involves students completing an experiment at home with inexpensive equipment. Other labs feature virtual labs that simulate experiments. But they also offer remote-controlled virtual labs. This option allows students to access advanced lab equipment remotely and complete experiments in real-time.
The virtual labs are offering surprising advantages compared to traditional in-person labs. In a traditional lab, students often work in groups where one student completes the experiment while the others watch. Individual online labs give everyone hands-on experience.
But some worry that missing out on the shared experience of completing a lab together can make engineering seem like a process of just learning facts. At MIT, Michael Short, who is a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has been working on ways to infuse his distance courses with shared context and stories.
One of the more eccentric ways he has achieved this has been by collecting the toenails of his students—in the name of science, of course. When toenails are exposed to neutrons in MIT’s nuclear reactor, they emit gamma rays that can indicate what chemicals the students have been exposed to.
This project engages students in science in a very meaningful way. “The toenails and DEXA scans are all about making science personal,” Short says. “Science is all around us, but it’s not always taught that way. Classes are often too detached to make things meaningful to students.”
Along this line, MIT has engaged students in a hackathon to think of new innovative ways to cope with COVID-19. COVID HACK was a three-day virtual hackathon that had undergraduate students develop practical solutions to improve campus life amid the pandemic restrictions. The event gave students a way to socialize, make a difference, and engage in science in a meaningful way.
The students embraced the challenge. Over 500 students participated and together created 115 teams. The hackathon focused on four areas: outdoor spaces, virtual community, remote learning, and policy awareness.
The students’ creativity did not disappoint. Their ideas ranged from creating life-size physical social bubbles to ways to reimagine online testing and assessment. One winning team created guided walking tours to help students explore and socialize on campus in a COVID-safe way.
COVID-19 has shown just how resilient students are. They are facing unprecedented challenges and lack many of the supports that being on campus offers. But despite this, you can still find examples of students finding ways to enjoy learning.
Nothing demonstrates this more than an Arduino robot car project created by Matt Luongo. He is a student at USC Viterbi, and for his AME 101 course, he programmed and choreographed a Cha Slide dance with his robot car.
Resilience seems to be a common theme when we look at how universities have been tackling the challenges of COVID-19. Many instructors, such as Dennis Irwin at Ohio University’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology, had to quickly adapt. He says he had to go from “zero experience with online instruction and very rusty lecturing and software skills to a pretty interactive environment in just a few days.”
This experience is not uncommon. The pandemic has been a global challenge and everyone has had to find ways to cope. But amidst this, Robert Green, who is the Assistant Dean at Mississippi State University’s College of Engineering, has found that faculty has been positive.
The faculty and students at Mississippi State University have been pulling together and finding new ways of working. “It is strange how we feel closer than ever,” Green says, “while being physically further apart than ever before.”
There is something about struggling together that fosters comradery. If we can find ways to come together to overcome the adversity we are currently facing, we will all be stronger for it. Engineering education may face additional challenges to translating the curriculum to online environments, but it is also a field that excels at creating innovative solutions.