Work in Progress: Benefits of Learning Engineering Sciences to Transition from Face-to-Face to Virtual Learning of Engineering, Technology, and Computing due to COVID-19

For equatorial African countries such as Rwanda the power grid in some regions is either absent or highly unreliable even though these locations are blessed with reliable solar radiation most of the time. Designing and implementing solar power systems capable of supporting micro-computer systems such as Raspberry Pi devices that can be used in educational environments is a way to overcome grid challenges while at the same time imparting valuable lessons covering Engineering, Technology, and Computing. Using Learning Engineering Sciences best practices effectively mitigates how COVID-19 that has required standard face-to-face project and learning strategies to transition to virtual or hybrid strategies that utilize Open Educational Resources (OER). These strategies include video conferencing, file sharing platforms, and messaging applications to generate learning activities, create courses to construct the learning program for training teachers in the use of OER and Raspberry Pi desktop devices. © 2023 IEEE.

Critical multimodal literacy practices in student‐created comics

In the wake of grim events such as Russian invasion on Ukraine, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the death of George Floyd in America and mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, all occurring amid the pandemic of COVID‐19, it became increasingly more important to recognise literacy work that promotes a critically informed and just society. Thus, through the lens of critical literacy and intersectionality, this study sought to examine how pre‐service teachers drew on critical multimodal literacy practices to create open educational resources (OER) or openly licensed comics that motivate local, global and/or transnational literacy education. Data collection took place at a four‐year public university in Upstate New York. They included student‐created comics, student reflections, researcher's fieldnotes and course syllabus. Findings from the study reveal that the pre‐service teachers incorporated either a local, global or transnational connection to enact a social change. Further analysis shows that the OER or student‐created comics inherently involve actions which are aligned with the three principles of social justice: redistributive justice, recognitive justice and representational justice.

Publishing Student-Generated Problems in an OER: Student Perceptions

Fundamental engineering courses provide learning opportunities for students to develop problem-solving and creativity skills, connect theoretical course material to the real world, and solve complex, problems such as those found in the workplace. Through a mixed-methods study of students in a statics course in a small Canadian university, we explored student motivation and perception of composing and publishing their own course-relevant problems in an open educational resource (OER) textbook. We found that generating and solving their own problems for each of the six homework assignments helped students to anchor theory in the real world, be creative, and understand the mate-rial more fully. In total, 93% of students in the course created at least one student -generated homework problem, and after the semester ended, 58% of students sub-mitted a combined total of 59 high-quality, interesting, real-world examples to be included in the OER textbook. Of the 28 study participants, 26 students (93%) felt the activity should be repeated in future years. Students were motivated to publish examples in the OER textbook by a desire to help future students and gain an understanding of the material. Students found generating problems time-consuming but enjoyed expressing their creativity.