Low-cost heat exchanger benches for remote operation

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges in operating the lab component of undergraduate courses and promoting active learning, with only a short time available to implement alternative teaching methods. In this work a low-cost platform for distance operation and assessment of replaceable bench-scale heat exchangers was developed to provide students an opportunity to observe the transient and steady-state behavior of heat exchangers while unable to access lab facilities. Each workbench had a new material cost of approximately C$5 000. Operation of physical equipment provided students the opportunity to observe non-ideal behavior and compare various heat transfer correlations which may not be seen in process simulators. The developed platform implemented an Arduino microcontroller for low-cost process control. Equipment was seamlessly slotted in to the existing course upon the return to on-campus learning and provided a more stable system when compared to previously existing lab experiments. Most learning outcomes were observed in remote and in-lab experiments and challenges faced in remote operation are highlighted. No statistically significant difference was observed in student performance between students completing lab experiments remotely and students completing experiments in-lab. © 2023 Institution of Chemical Engineers

A Framework for Assessing Higher Education Courses Employability

The 4th Industrial Revolution is causing profound and accelerated changes to work, bringing new opportunities and challenges as new technologies impact practically all occupations. The transformations in the labor market were accelerated even more due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the scenario where old careers cease to exist, and new occupations are being created, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) need to be prepared to educate professionals capable of getting and keeping qualified jobs. To do so, HEIs need tools to evaluate their undergraduate courses in the face of the changing demands of the labor market. We propose a novel approach to employability from the perspective of HEIs, creating a framework- called Higher Education Courses Employability (HECE). The framework can help HEI decision-makers to make decisions based on employability data. The framework allows for mitigating the reported gap between the theory taught in HEIs and the labor market demands. We evaluated the HECE framework as useful and relevant by HEI decision-makers and Employability experts from Brazil, a continental country with great social differences between and within its regions, and where the unemployment and underemployment rates demonstrate the mismatch between the labor market demands and the undergraduate course's curricula. The applicability of HECE in different Brazillian regions provides evidence that we can apply the framework in most contexts. This study provides tools to facilitate the implementation of the framework by HEIs. The evaluators reported the innovative nature of the approach of this research. © 2013 IEEE.

Teaching control courses online during the covid-19 pandemic: some experiences at the University of Brescia

In this paper we present the experience of online teaching of some control courses during two years of covid-19 pandemic at the University of Brescia. Different (undergraduate and postgraduate) courses are considered and a survey has been conducted with the students to evaluate pros and cons of the new way of teaching. A specific initiative employed in the second year to increase the student engagement has also been evaluated. It is believed that the results of the survey can help in discussing and learning best practices to apply during the pandemic and when this will be finished. © 2022 The Authors.

Practice and Exploration of a Task-Based Method for the Online Teaching of Undergraduate Geophysics Courses

In 2020, the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) became a catalyst for the development of online teaching. However, online teaching has faced the problems of insufficient teaching flexibility and weakened teacher management, which has greatly affected teaching effectiveness in science and engineering. A task-based method has universality and applicability in teaching activities. This method, combined with the diversified auxiliary tools in online teaching of the task-based method, in undergraduate geophysical courses was adopted. Following online teaching in spring 2020, students have made great progress in terms of geophysics competition. In addition, the statistical results of the questionnaire showed that more than half of undergraduates endorsed task-based teaching. This study indicates that online task-based teaching in geophysical courses has already made initial progress in increasing the flexibility of teaching, improving students' self-learning awareness, and developing their exploration and design skills. Task-based online teaching can be widely promoted for earth science and other science and engineering majors.

Taking a mass participant course in digital design from local to online during the Covid-19 pandemic

During the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, the traditional education structure as we know it has been largely transformed due to lockdowns and social distancing. This study is a detailed description of how a normally face-to-face undergraduate course in digital design with laboratory sessions at the University of Iceland was transformed into a fully online based course. We show the essentialities required to transform the lectures and laboratory sessions from local to online. Furthermore, we compare the students' performance during the online teaching with that of previous students who participated in local teaching. © 2022 IEEE.

Conducting an Electronics Remote Lab Experiment: A Case Study

A laboratory experiment in an undergraduate course on electronics was conducted remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lab assignment was to construct and analyze a single-transistor NPN amplifier. In the conventional on-site lab experiment the students would construct the amplifier on a breadboard, carry out measurements of DC and small signal characteristics, and compare with both SPICE simulations and manual calculations. The pandemic prevented the attendance of students in the lab, and thus the experiment was redesigned and carried out online, using remotely controlled instruments through the internet. It was found that to some extent a remotely conducted experiment can substitute the on-site work, and there are some unique advantages of this approach. On the other hand, some aspects of the on-site laboratory experiment cannot be substituted by the remote experience, and this is discussed in the paper. © 2022 IEEE.

Using Mixed Reality in Online Learning Environments

Among the technological advancements of Industry 4.0, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) have been used in many industries to visualize and interact with digital twins in real-time. These technologies have also been used with building information modeling (BIM) and geographic information systems (GIS) throughout the life cycle of construction projects. Moreover, the integration of BIM and GIS has been proven to improve collaboration among stakeholders by allowing them to visualize information seamlessly between buildings and their surroundings. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many undergraduate and graduate courses were moved online, which posed many challenges on instructors to deliver lectures in accessible and informative ways. Furthermore, many courses and curricula have been originally online and have not yet benefited from the full potential of MR in virtual classrooms. Therefore, the aim of this research is to evaluate how MR applications of integrated BIM-GIS can improve the online learning experience of construction management students. An experimental study was conducted with students to evaluate the effect of using AR on handheld devices and MR on head-mounted devices on their spatio-temporal reasoning and understanding skills. © 2021 Computing in Civil Engineering 2021 - Selected Papers from the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering 2021. All rights reserved.

THE NEGATIONIST CONTEXT AND THE RESISTANCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY Aspects associated with the pandemic in the 2021 ENADE tests

The debate on the inclusion of aspects associated with the pandemic in the General Training component of 2021 ENADE (National Performance Exam) tests is justified because this topic is not listed as a possibility from the base of standard items for all courses. In this sense, it is understood that the inclusion of topics associated with the pandemic of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 in the General Training component of ENADE 2021 tests is an essential indicator of the topics perceived as relevant by the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anisio Teixeira (INEP), the institution responsible for preparing ENADE tests. We propose that the presence of this content is perceived as a resistance movement by the academic community to the negationist environment that permeated the areas of Education, Health, and Science in Brazil.

Multimodal active learning methods for biological psychology

Historically, students struggle with biological psychology content and many educators have implemented active learning methods to increase student understanding of difficult topics. However, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has raised challenges of moving these activities to an online environment. This chapter discusses learning activities appropriate for undergraduate courses that cover a broad range of topics such as neurons, action potential, neuroanatomy, brain functions, sensation and perception and psychophysics. A panel of faculty who have previously taught these topics online presented several ways to effectively teach these sometimes-difficult topics that would benefit student learning in both the traditional classroom and the online modality. While all anticipates the instruction to be once again is in the classroom, having alternatives to the traditional classroom can increase accessibility and options for engagement in complex and often difficult content. Lastly, it opens the floor for contributions from the audience, for things that worked best for them and things that they may want to troubleshoot for future courses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

An undergraduate course for FOSS and with FOSS

Many universities have incorporated free and open-source software (FOSS) into undergraduate courses, though few research efforts have specifically investigated the interactions between undergraduates and real-world FOSS projects. In this paper, we present our experience of participating in the development of real-world FOSS projects, dealing with the challenges caused by COVID-19, and the feasibility of remote education with FOSS only. Our experience shows that undergraduates and FOSS projects can help each other well. Moreover, we summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the existing FOSS communities in attracting undergraduates and provide some suggestions. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

Gratitude and Graph Theory in the Time of Coronavirus

In this work, we describe two activities that we have designed - suitable for an introductory undergraduate course in computational and data science - that introduce rudimentary principles of graph theory. Both activities feature simple premises (yet have the potential for significant depth, depending on student interest and mathematical maturity), strengthen students' abilities in mathematical and computational reasoning, and interweave timely “out-of-the-classroom” themes that will resonate in 2021 and beyond. We also provide qualitative results from the deployment of these activities in a sophomore-level civil and environmental engineering class. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Remote Versus In-Class Active Learning Exercises for an Undergraduate Course in Fluid Mechanics

Fluid Mechanics is a fundamental core course in mechanical engineering curricula that covers the motion of fluids (liquids and gases), internal flows (flows in pipes/ducts), external flows (flow around vehicles and aircraft, river flow, etc.), and flow vector fields which require higherorder math skills to master. We have taught the undergraduate fluid mechanics course in hybrid modality with active in-class learning before the COVID-19 pandemic. Once the COVID-19 pandemic required the instruction to move to the remote format in the middle of the Spring2020 semester, we have started a new open Courseware website and a new YouTube channel and hosted 200+ lecture videos totaling 45 hours of undergraduate fluid mechanics class and prerequisite differential equations content and continued the active learning exercises via synchronous remote sessions. This paper discusses how the transition was accomplished and how the synchronous remote sessions were handled for continued active learning exercises for 100+ students enrolled in the class in spring 2020 and beyond. We also distributed a survey on students and inquired about how the student perception and learning effectiveness of active remote learning exercises vs. active in-class exercises. The students overall appreciated the availability of lecture videos and preferred to watch the lecture videos directly from YouTube as opposed to the Learning Management system. The majority of students found the effort to be more for remote instruction, as they found more responsibility has been placed on them. As a result, around 80% of students either preferred in-class active learning or were not sure for the Spring2020 semester. The percentage of students preferring online instruction increased for the Summer 2020 and Fall2020 semesters. As an example, just slightly over 50 percent of the students preferred in-class instruction as of the Fall2020 semester. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Feedback and Control Course Labs for Distance Learning

Classic Feedback and Control is an undergraduate course that introduces students to concepts and methods for modeling, analysis, and design of single-input-single-output feedback control systems in the Electrical and/or Computer Engineering majors. In addition to using lectures to explain theories and assigning homework assignments for students to practice their modeling and analyses skills, instructors would usually supplement the course by a series of hardware-based experiments and software-based simulation labs so that students can apply the acquired knowledge to physical systems and real-world control problems. Similar to many other institutions, our ECE program offers a Feedback and Control course to junior students in the Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering majors. This course is a 3-hour lecture, 2-hour lab, as a 4-credit course. Topics discussed include modeling in both the time and the frequency domains, time response, model reduction, stability, steady-state error, root locus, design via root locus, frequency response, and design via frequency response. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both students and faculty in our institution were forced to work and study from home in summer 2020. In order to engage students in distance learning, application-oriented and active-learning opportunities were created. A series of exclusively software-based labs and projects were designed to help students gain a better understanding of how the knowledge are useful in real-world situations. Particularly, nine simulation labs and two simulation projects were used in the class of summer 2020. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed simulation labs and projects in helping students to grasp and then apply the control concepts and ideas, surveys were conducted in the summer 2020 class to collect students' opinions and feedbacks. Among the 27 participating students, 81.4% of students “agree” or “strongly agree” that simulation laboratory exercises increased their interest in the subject, 85.1% of students “agree” or “strongly agree” that simulation laboratory exercises helped them better to learn course content, and 77.7% of the students thought simulation laboratory exercises were excellent or very good. We also compared the percentage of students who performed at the A, A-, B+, B, and B- levels with past records (while teaching was in-person), which turned out to be comparable and similar. This indicates the effectiveness of these simulation-based labs & projects, and their contribution in helping to maintain the course standard. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Virtual Lab Modules for Undergraduate Courses Related to Building Energy Systems

Background: In engineering education, hands-on laboratory experience is essential to enhancing students' practical skills such as conceptual understanding and problem solving skills. However, many students are not able to participate in practical activities (e.g., laboratory experiments) due to inaccessible or unavailable “brick and mortar” laboratories, especially when most universities have currently adopted online instruction while students are sheltered at home due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Purpose: This paper presents a library of virtual laboratory modules expanded and enriched from our initial learning app through an Augmented Reality (AR) environment, where virtual objects (augmented components) are superimposed onto a real learning setting during online lecture instruction. Specifically, to facilitate students' gaining practical skills, a library of virtual objects was established for the main physical components or systems related to the undergraduate “Heating, Ventilating, and Air-conditioning (HVAC)” class to allow students to be immersed in an augmented learning reality representing the real physical world. Design: The library of virtual lab modules was established by 1) including all the main HVAC components in an HVAC course;2) refining these components' 3D models with learning materials (e.g., concept and evaluation);3) improving the AR method to recognize each component's figures or pictures from any learning document (e.g., printed lecture ppt notes, textbook, and documents shown on computer or mobile screens);and 4) improving and/or reproducing the initial AR app using the OpenCV (replacing the original EasyAR software development kit) to sequence the learning materials upon request once a component is recognized. Results: This updated AR app with enriched virtual lab modules was tested and validated by the class lecturer and graduate students who had already taken this HVAC class. Their feedback showed that the AR tool would allow students to learn at their own pace while the instructor is not face-to-face with them, and the results revealed that the tool enhanced student's practical skills especially when they are sheltered at their homes without accessing a physical lab. This AR-based supplementary learning tool is ready for use in the HVAC class for this coming spring semester, and the app's effectiveness will be more comprehensively evaluated once students in the class adopt the tool. Conclusion: A well-designed AR learning app will effectively guide students to perform hands-on experiments related to the HVAC course. The alternative pedagogy through AR technology also provides an efficient way to deliver practical experience online, especially when on-campus lab resources are limited or people are sheltered at home during natural disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

A University-State College Collaborative Project for Hispanic Student Success in STEM

The session will report on the success of the last four years of implementing a collaborative DOE project between two state colleges and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) university with a combined 140,000+ undergraduate students. The session will also report the revision of a Systemic, Evidenced-Based, and Student-Centered (SE-SC) framework as initially designed in the DOE project. The original SE-SC framework aims to maximize the number of academically-talented, Hispanic students who complete their AS degrees at State Colleges and transfer to a 4-year institution to complete their B.S. degree and are career-ready to enter engineering and computer science (ECS). The revised SE-SC framework addresses the fully on-line education challenge of undergraduate courses due to the current COVID-19 situation. In particular, the challenges and student outcomes of on-line lab participation are addressed. In addition, the on-line revision of a course-specific mentoring Support Model to ensure student success in completing the Gateway Courses is reported. The overall objective of the mentoring component of the project has been to support students enrolled in gateway mathematics courses to ensure successful course completion. The on-line challenges of mentors and advisors due to the COVID-19 situation are reported in the paper. Data collected for the past four years (2016-2020) validate the proposed initiative's effectiveness. Besides, our innovative approaches to address education, advising, and mentoring challenges due to COVID-19 are presented in the paper. The collaborative model's effectiveness and significance could be replicated among other institutions interested in promoting engineering degrees among Hispanic and low-income students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021