ABSTRACT
Documentation can support design work and create opportunities for learning and reflection. We explore how a novel documentation tool for a remote interaction design course provides insight into design process and integrates strategies from expert practice to support studio-style collaboration and reflection. Using Research through Design, we develop and deploy Kaleidoscope, an online tool for documenting design process, in an upper-level HCI class during the COVID-19 pandemic, iteratively developing it in response to student feedback and needs. We discuss key themes from the real-world deployment of Kaleidoscope, including: tensions between documentation and creation;effects of centralizing discussion;privacy and visibility in shared spaces;balancing evidence of achievement with feelings of overwhelm;and the effects of initial perceptions and incentives on tool usage. These successes and challenges provide insights to guide future tools for design documentation and HCI education that scaffold learning process as an equal partner to execution. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
This Research Full Paper builds on a prior study that compared overall student performance between in-hand versus remotely accessible hardware in digital design courses. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a global educational shift to emergency online learning that led to rethinking the delivery of engineering labs. The prior study showed that, amidst pandemic-necessitated online learning, student understanding was not impeded by the incorporation of remotely accessible hardware into the course curriculum;rather, using remote hardware resulted in similar or better learning outcomes. In this paper, we analyze the remotely accessible hardware lab through the lens of equity, investigating the student perspective on equitable access and the remote lab experience. The study accomplishes this goal by surveying students of a junior-level digital design course who use a remotely accessible hardware lab for completing their assignments. The survey aims to determine the factors deemed important by today's learners - those who have experienced remote learning for approximately two years of their educational careers - when considering equitable access and remote labs. Survey questions utilized the multiple-choice, semantic differential scale, and Likert scale formats for quantitative analysis as well as inductive coding of freeform responses for qualitative analysis. Initial findings from the survey are the key considerations of the surveyed students which include Factors of the Remote Experience (FREs) and Factors of Equitable Access (FEAs). FREs and FEAs specifically relate to the Student's Access to Electronic Devices, the Student's Environment Outside of Class, the Student's Schedule, the Student's Internet Quality, the lab's Learnability, the lab's Web Interface Design, the lab's Convenience, the lab's Overall Positive Experience, the lab's Ease of Use, the lab's Internet Quality, and the lab's Affordability. Rooted in the online learner's experience, these results contribute to an improved understanding of how students perceive equitable access to engineering education which shall guide better-informed advancements in the field in a post-pandemic world. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This Evidence-Based Practice paper contains a study about the similarities and differences in team development among first-year engineering students during an introductory design course at a major university in the eastern United States. The study contained ten teams that operated in a totally online environment in Spring 2021, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and ten teams that operated in person in Spring 2022. All teams consisted of students in their second semester of college. © 2022 First-Year Engineering Experience, FYEE 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In the laboratory classroom, students have opportunities for design, problem solving, and exposure to real-world issues that are not usually present in traditional homework assignments. However, to operate effective laboratories, engineering departments and colleges must address challenges such as budget constraints, space limitations, class size, and limited teaching resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these issues and added more with the need for online and remote learning experiences without sacrificing the benefits of experiential learning. Laboratory and design courses were significantly impacted by the sudden move to remote delivery during pandemic lockdowns. Instructors and departments made decisions for adapting each course based on specific needs. Throughout that time, instructors in lab and design courses identified both the successes and the continuing challenges to remote and hybrid delivery. When courses returned to in-person modalities, instructors considered what lessons learned can inform the future of experiential learning-based courses. This paper describes development of a Community of Practice (CoP) of lab and design course instructors to develop strategies and best practices across one engineering college as we enter a new era of teaching and learning, post-COVID. This paper describes formation of the lab and design CoP, practical operating details of the CoP, as well as lessons learned from delivery of workshops and meetings. In addition to providing a road map for instructors to form a similar working group at their institution, we will share knowledge gained, commonalities across course types, and a summary of answers to the questions that inspired the formation of this CoP. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
In this Work in progress (WIP) study, we discuss the impact of the comprehensive shift in the modes of instruction since the onset of Covid-19. The need for variant modes required the instructors to be creative and flexible in their teaching methods. The designers of the engineering courses had to be creative to retain student attention and add flexibility based on changing needs. This research study was a timely need as it identifies the impact of various modes of instruction, i.e., emergency remote instruction (ERI), online instruction, and HyFlex (Hybrid+flexible) through a technical design course. The evaluation of varying methods of instruction and their impact on learning and student performance is a timely necessity. This study statistically analyzes the implication of the changes in instruction modalities, which happened to make imparting education a possibility. In this paper, we have studied the relationship between student performances and the modes of instruction. For this purpose, data has been collected throughout different semesters from 236 students in an AutoCAD design course. For this year-long study, we have used regression analysis to understand the impact of the different modes of instruction on students' performances. We also conducted ANOVA to compare the mean difference in students' performance during different modalities. The results indicate that students in emergency remote instruction (ERI) outperform students in online instruction and HyFlex (Hybrid+flexible) modality. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Delivering hands-on design and manufacturing courses is challenging in several lecture and laboratory settings. This type of instruction is even harder lately due to higher education institutions' strict COVID-19 policies and procedures, since offering the courses in on-ground settings is not a possibility. One method practiced by a high number of educators to meet course learning outcomes and ABET student outcomes is to implement the Flipped Classroom technique. In a Flipped Classroom, course lectures and laboratories are provided to students earlier than the class time. Then, class times are used to provide more practice and content so that students can learn more in their regular lectures and lab hours. This paper reports the structure of a few Flipped Classroom courses from a diverse group of institutions and the evaluation results received from these courses. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a novel project-oriented system on chip (SoC) design course. The course is taught in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at the University of Texas at Arlington and is offered as CSE 4356 System on Chip Design for computer engineering undergraduates, as CSE 5356 for computer engineering graduate students, and as EE 5315 for electrical engineering graduate students. It is taught as one course combining all numbers. All students are given the same lectures, course materials, assignments, and projects. Grading standards and expectations are the same for all students as well. The course in its current form was first offered in fall 2020 and was taught online due to COVID-19 restrictions. The course was offered again in fall 2021 in a traditional on-campus, in-person mode of delivery. Two seasoned educators, with more than eighty years of total teaching experience, combined to team teach the course. One also brought more than thirty years of industrial design experience to the course. SoC FPGA devices have been available for use by designers for more than 10 years and are widely used in applications that require both an embedded microcomputer and FPGA-based logic for real-time computationally-intense solutions. Such solutions require skills in C programming, HDL programming, bus topologies forming the bridge between FPGA fabric and the microprocessor space, Linux operating systems and virtualization, and kernel device driver development. The breadth of the skills that were conveyed to students necessitated a team teaching approach to leverage the diverse background of the instructors. With such a wide range of topics, one of the biggest challenges was developing a course that was approachable for a greatly varied population of students - a mix of Computer Engineering (CpE) and Electrical Engineering (EE) students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Another, perhaps less obvious, challenge was the inherently application focus of the course, which presents challenges to many graduate students whose undergraduate degree lacked a robust hands-on design experience. Selection of an appropriate project was key to making the course effective and providing a fun learning experience for students. The projects were aligned to relevant industry applications, stressing complex modern intellectual property (IP) work flows, while still being approachable to students. The design of a universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) IP module in 2020 and a serial peripheral interface (SPI) IP module in 2021 were chosen as the projects for the first two offerings of the course. The Terasic/Intel DE1-SoC development board and Intel Quartus Prime 18.1 design software were the technologies chosen for the course. The development board and basic test instruments were provided to each student in a take-home lab kit. The system on chip design course has proven to be a popular but challenging course for our undergraduate and graduate students in computer engineering and electrical engineering. The course has demonstrated that it is possible to successfully teach an advanced design-oriented course to students of varying majors, levels, educational backgrounds, and cultures. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Due to COVID-19, all classes in schools have been converted to distance learning using online platforms. However, various problems were raised when converting face-to-face classes to online distance learning. In particular, the difficulties were more pronounced for practical design courses because they include practical experience. In this context, this study focused on actual online distance learning classroom cases in design education. Based on the qualitative case study methodology, four instructors were interviewed about their experience with distance learning courses that actively utilized online platforms for college design courses as research cases. In design education, which aims at interdisciplinary and convergence thinking, online distance learning is meaningful in that it can expand experience and opportunities for the overall formative design through the development of technology. On the other hand, there are clear limitations in terms of practical production activities for existing online distance learning methods. Therefore, it is necessary to explore whether to develop classes based on the recently used effective activities or whether to find new strategies in the case that these limitations are fundamental to online distance learning. © 2022 IADIS Press. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The previous years have brought a major disruption with the COVID-19 outbreak, and universities around the world had to quickly adapt to the new format of teaching and learning. Different fields faced various obstacles in trying to provide the best possible classroom-like experience to students during the lockdown. For engineering study programs, especially in the courses where the laboratory is very important, it was a difficult task to replicate the syllabus in the online domain. This paper presents experiences from online teaching of the Digital System Design course at the University of Novi Sad. Traditional and online variants of the course are presented and compared, with the focus on laboratory exercises which were the most difficult to adapt. In addition, student experiences are summarized and compared to experiences in the previous years when the course was held traditionally. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.
ABSTRACT
The Interior Design Study Program of Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia focuses primarily on design education. The main objectives of this study are teaching how to design and educating designers to be professional. The exhibition design course is an elective course and uses a student-centered learning method. This method is usually adopted to improve student participation. Active student participation is a major element in almost every learning process. This course not only provides knowledge about the ins and outs of exhibition design, but also invites students to solve problems through given assignments. Each assignment is unique and forces the student to role-play as a stakeholder around an exhibition, such as a designer, visitor, content creator, decision maker, etc., to provide different points of view. The student is asked to see the problem from different angles and produce optimal solutions based on their skills and knowledge. The present study was based on observation of the process and results of Exhibition Design courses from two semesters in 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the assignment results and their evaluation, it is shown that this approach can generate student participation and improve the students' understanding of the subject. The students were always curious about what would happen in the next lecture. All students showed positive learning experiences throughout the course. The general concept of this learning method could be implemented to varying degrees in other courses in interior design schools.
ABSTRACT
Today electrical learning or online learning is inevitable. This is evident with the COVID-19 pandemic causing education to be adjusted to be 100% online. This technique affects many courses that are usually taught in class and requires some workshops for working in a team. Product development and design is a course that requires a lot of adjustment from working and learning in class to be online. However, there is no explanation to guideline about which online methods and applications are suitable for this course. This paper, therefore, aims to design an online learning course for two product development and design courses that have different teaching conditions and environments by applying different online methods and applications such as live teaching and video, google classroom, and the SUT X-lane. An assessment comes from the results of the survey and scores of assignments and exams. Results show that teaching by recording video and conference video have their potential and is suitable in different environments and conditions regarding participants and time. However, teaching methods are not the main factor for the efficiency of studying. Self-controlled is an important factor for learning, which is high in mature students. Assignments and workshops can be done online by working on an online platform such as Padlet, Zoom, and Line applications. Some tasks that require laboratory such as creating physical products however could not be fulfilled by the online platform. This should be achieved if the online course is expected for future education. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present our experience with the use of breakout rooms in a second year undergraduate Software Design course at a large North American institution. Following the switch to remote instruction during the coronavirus pandemic, we revamped our in-person Software Design course to be delivered as a flipped online course, making extensive use of in-lecture exercises completed during breakout rooms. We report on the structure and logistics of this lecture design (for a large class of 300+ students). To gain insights into the impact of the use of breakout rooms on student experience, we conducted weekly student surveys asking for feedback on the lectures and specifically on the use of breakout rooms. Although many students had positive feelings regarding the use of breakout rooms, a significant percentage of students (an average of 47% of the survey responses each week) expressed negative feelings toward them. In an end-of-term survey, we specifically asked students about what they felt worked best for breakout rooms in terms of group size and pre-assigned versus randomized groups, and if there were any other areas that they felt needed improvement. Some of the patterns we observed were that most students liked smaller groups (2-5 people), preferred staying in the same group throughout the semester, and enjoyed the use of breakout rooms as long as others in their room were active participants. We share the details of these survey results as well as the tips and lessons that we learned through this experience. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) and hardware-software co-design are greatly emphasized in the CS community, which demands a significant number of participants with Computer System (CSys) capabilities and skills. Conventional CSys courses in a lecture-lab format are limited in physical resources and inherently difficult to cultivate talents at a large scale. Online teaching is a potential alternative to instantly enlarge the face-to-face class size. Unfortunately, simply putting the lecture contents in CSys courses online lacks 1) personal attention, 2) learner-instructor interactions, and 3) real-hardware experimental environments. To tackle the above challenges, we introduce a four phase online CSys course program and the related teaching methods for a cloud-based teaching platform. The four-phase course program included two basic/required stages and two advanced/optional stages to promote students' knowledge and skill level with appropriate personal attention. We studied if online interaction methods, such as in-class chat and one-on-one online grading interview, can strengthen the connections between teachers and students in both lectures and labs. We created a heterogeneous cloud platform to enable students nationwide to reliably conduct labs or projects on remote programmable hardware. We believe that our proposed course design methodology is beneficial to other CScourses in the post-COVID-19-era. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Two core courses have been given for several years to senior chemical engineering undergraduate students in flipped format, combining pre-class online preparation by the students, “class meetings” with the lecturer, and “active tutorials,” in which groups of students solve exercises. In 2020/21, the COVID-19 lockdown imposed online teaching of these courses to the 54 enrolled students. The objective of work presented in this paper is to explore the impact of the remote flipped classroom design on students' learning experience and achievements, in comparison to the regular flipped class in which only the first preparation phase was online. Because the course was taught completely online, a plethora of data was for the first time made available to support a thorough study of the course teaching protocol, including data from Panopto Analytics®, Zoom and Moodle logs, extensive self-report surveys, as well as actual learning outcomes (exam results). Statistical analyses including multivariate regression were performed to determine which factors most affect learning outcomes. The student surveys indicate that of the three class steps, the “active tutorial” gives students the most confidence in their mastery. Furthermore, analysis indicates that active students think that they benefit more than do passive students, as reflected by both self-reporting and final exam performances. The importance of underlying ability, as indicated by the GPA is a principal conclusion from the regression model, which also identifies attendance of “active tutorials” as a dominant positive effect on exam grades. Two important conclusions of our work are that the online and face-to-face versions of our flipped approach achieve indistinguishable learning outcomes and that students’ perceived confidence in their mastery is highest after the active tutorial.
ABSTRACT
A capstone course is usually the peak experience for students in most engineering education programs. In addition to any specific learning objectives, capstone courses provide students with the finishing touches needed for fielded practice, the opportunity to boost their confidence, and the platform to demonstrate the attainment of the program student outcomes. Depending on the program and discipline, engineering capstone courses usually take the form of open-ended design projects that integrate and synthesize what students have learned through the academic program in a team setting experience. As defined by ABET, “Engineering design is a process of devising a system, component, or process to meet desired needs and specifications within constraints. It is an iterative, creative, decision-making process in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources into solutions. Engineering design involves identifying opportunities, developing requirements, performing analysis and synthesis, generating multiple solutions, evaluating solutions against requirements, considering risks, and making trade-offs, for the purpose of obtaining a high-quality solution under the given circumstances.” Considering the importance of capstone courses to program accreditation, learning objectives and outcomes that are aligned with the ABET engineering design definition should be established and achieved. This paper discusses and addresses the achievement of the learning objectives and student outcomes of a capstone courses, aligned with the ABET engineering design definition, during the online teaching format necessitated by COVID-19. Based on the experience with the online format, project-based engineering capstone courses could be successfully taught in the online format. However, there few issues that must be addressed for achievements of the course learning objectives and attainment of student outcomes. While some of these issues are directly related to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and not necessarily to the online format, addressing these issues is necessary for successful online capstone experience. To demonstrate the achievements of the course learning objectives and attainment of student outcomes by addressing the online format issues, some examples of students' engineering capstone project work are presented. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
Design critiques are a central component of the design studio. In engineering education, where the design studio pedagogy is becoming increasingly popular, peer-led critiques can play an important role to support and complement the feedback student teams receive from instructors and clients. In capstone design courses, peer critiques are typically delivered in face-to-face, synchronous environments, where students can demo their design progress and engage in constructive back-and-forth discussion with their peers. The disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused many design courses to be held remotely, has forced instructors to re-imagine how peer critique can be delivered in a virtual, mostly asynchronous setting. In this paper, we describe and evaluate an asynchronous and virtual implementation of peer critiques that are delivered using a text-based discussion forum. Taking a question-asking lens, we analyze hundreds of questions posed by students in asynchronous peer critiques of a capstone design course, and compare the distributions of low-level, deep reasoning, and generative design questions to results of prior studies that have produced analogous distributions in conventional face-to-face settings. We find that a larger portion of peer inquiry that is delivered in written form in asynchronous critiques is composed of generative design questions, which serve to expand the design space, and which have been previously found to be highly valued by design teams. Our findings serve to not only evaluate the effectiveness of the written, asynchronous approach to design critiques, but also support a discussion on how some of its features can be useful even when in-person peer design critiques are feasible. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has isolated many engineering students at home and complicated access to instrumentation and hardware resources necessary to support laboratory courses. One viable alternative to bringing the hardware to students (and the correspondingly high overhead associated with shipping laboratory kits all over the world) is to enable remote access to that hardware. A remote lab allows students to access real hardware physically located in a single location from anywhere in the world. Advances in cloud computing allow students to take advantage of a full-fledged remote experience without compromising what they could have accomplished if they were physically present in the lab. While remote access laboratories are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic has enabled a unique opportunity to compare learning with how remote access to real hardware vs. hands-on access to the same hardware. Comparisons between the two modes of learning were made for a junior level course in digital circuit design using field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware offered via remote access in autumn 2020 and via hands-on access in the same course in winter 2020. Detailed assessments of student work were grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy to classify the complexity of student cognition and learning. This study presents assessment results associated with a single laboratory assignment that was the first in a series of laboratory assignments in the digital design course. Work from 41 students from each offering were analyzed within the first five levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Results show that students performed significantly better in terms of overall scores and analyze skills when presented with remote access to laboratory hardware than when having that hardware in hand. Comparisons between the two settings in the remaining four levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, evaluate) were not significantly different between the two offerings. These results complement other studies that highlight the benefits of remote laboratories. Accordingly, the increased efficiency and cost savings of the remote lab approach can offer stable and reliable instruction well beyond the COVID-19 crisis. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
Teamwork is an important skill valued by corporate employers across the globe. As such, it is crucial for students to learn teamwork for the purpose of securing a job and performing well in corporate environments. In addition to certain technical skills, essential 21st-century skills include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. A well-known learning theory that helps students learn these skills is cooperative learning. Cooperative learning posits that when students collaborate within teams to solve complex problems, their creativity and critical thinking skills are improved as a result. Implementing cooperative learning in the past several months has been challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden shift from face-to-face to online instruction, has left a void for newer pedagogical approaches to teach teamwork. In this full paper, we investigate the impact of cooperative learning during the Spring 2020 semester by studying team retrospectives written by students enrolled in a system analysis and design course. The pedagogical foundation for the system analysis and design course was cooperative learning. The course required students to work in teams to develop a software prototype. The project was divided into four milestones and each team was required to submit a team retrospective detailing overall planning, task allocation, group processes, and strategies for improvement. The first two milestones were completed during face-to-face instruction, while teams met online for the last two milestones due to the shift to online instruction. To investigate team effectiveness, a rubric based on the Goals, Roles, Processes and Interpersonal relations (GRPI) model of team effectiveness was created and team retrospectives were scored using that rubric. We used a mixed-method approach to explore the following research questions: 1) What was the impact on team effectiveness when instruction changed from face-to-face to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic? 2)What strategies were adopted by teams to navigate the sudden change in instruction? To address the first research question, we performed inferential statistics to compare the impact of team effectiveness between face-to-face and online instruction. To address the second research question, we conducted a thematic analysis to understand the qualitative differences of team effectiveness for face-to-face and online instruction. Our results demonstrate a significant increase in teamwork effectiveness for online instruction. In addition, our thematic analysis shows particular strategies adopted by teams that led to improved team effectiveness in the online instruction environment. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
With all the changes in the educational landscape due to COVID-19, capstone design courses have been uniquely affected. With several transitions to virtual course delivery and/or hybrid models of learning, capstone faculty are now challenged with helping students meet project objectives and deliverables, fostering student team cohesion, and managing sponsor expectations in virtual settings, all while fulfilling the course learning outcomes. While there have been countless programs, communities, and support systems implemented to guide the transition to online teaching, initially there was very little available to systematically understand and support the capstone and PBL community. The objectives of this work are twofold. The first aim is to outline the challenges faced by capstone faculty due to transitions to primarily remote capstone offerings, particularly within the areas of managing sponsorship, completing projects, and producing the associated final project deliverables. The second objective is to open a dialogue to chronicle concerns, gather input, and share best practices across the broader capstone community. The overarching goal is to help overcome -and even rise to- these challenges. This research was conducted by capstone faculty at four different universities. The first phase of this initiative involved research to identify the issues and practices in the existing literature, especially relevant to virtual capstone offerings. The second phase of this research involved a survey of capstone faculty on this topic to reinforce and/or supplement the literature findings as the virtual circumstances evolved. To understand the acute challenges, the survey noted above was conducted with the broader capstone community to include a diversity of faculty associated with capstone at a variety of institutions. This included capstone directors, coordinators, instructors, and advisors. The third phase gathered information through a panel organized and conducted by the authors at the most recent ASEE conference while dealing with societal and academic COVID-19 restrictions. The ASEE panel served as a platform to bring together the capstone community for ongoing dialogue, supplying additional solution recommendations. Results from this research coupled with literature findings indicated the commonality of challenges faced by capstone programs regardless of timing, engineering major, program profile, or type of institution. Among the survey results were the following: (1) Due to COVID-19 conditions, 44% of the respondents reported complete cancellation of this event while 56% reported conducting some form of virtual exposition. The work represented in this paper supports an intention to be agile enough to adapt to any situation along this continuum - and likewise be posed to adjust when our capstone programs must react to emerging circumstances in the future. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a framework for enabling students to remotely interact with laboratory computers and equipment for traditional, in-person laboratory courses. This framework was developed due to the closure of campus facilities and the transition to remote course delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This transition was particularly difficult for hands-on laboratory courses. The laboratory course used as a test-case for the framework was an IoT Edge Computing design course that had an on-campus laboratory equipped with workstation computers, development boards, isolated network segments, and custom sensor hardware. Duplicating this setup would be cost prohibitive for students so remote access to the lab was essential. A detailed description of the lab station architecture, development hardware connectivity requirements, network security issues, student guides, and custom software to support the framework is presented along with the educational goals that drove those decisions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned in this first remote delivery offering, a discussion on how remote delivery impacted student mastery of the course materials, what aspects of the remote laboratory might be generalized to other hardware-intensive courses, and what improvements may be made in future iterations of the course. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021