Impact of Modality on Workload among Engineering Undergraduates during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented disruptions in models for engineering student training. At The Citadel, an undergraduate-focused college in the Southeastern United States, a variety of modalities were implemented following the onset of the pandemic, including emergency online and Hyflex learning. We conducted a longitudinal study to analyze the cognitive load among our undergraduate engineering students throughout changing modalities. Using data from the NASA Task Load Index (TLX) and open-ended reflections on student challenges, we found that total workload (a surrogate for cognitive load) was generally highest during emergency online learning in the second half of Spring 2020 semester, with experiences possibly varying across different demographic and academic groups. Emergency online challenges were often related to time management, personal organization, and responsibility for learning. In contrast, HyFlex challenges were often related to technology and communication challenges. While emergency online learning was a cognitive load disruption, that disruption was often associated with personal and/or academic development. HyFlex learning mediated cognitive load disruption;although, student challenges may have been simple nuisances rather than mediators of developmental change. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

An Approach of Skill-Based Education for Industry-Ready Electrical Engineers: Power Electronics Course as A Case Study

Recently, and particularly after the Covid19 pandemic period and during teaching different courses, it has been noticed that most of the undergraduate engineering students have rising the type of questions such as ''Why we are learning this particular course?'' and ''What are the main benefits and direct impacts of such course on our future carrier? Also as a direct impact of the new available job requirements, it becomes most importance to prepare future engineers to thrive in recent dynamic changing in employment landscape. Hence for students who want to compete and involved in promising working opportunities, it is important to bridging the gap between teaching courses and the industry requirements by focusing on the concept of ''Industry Ready Engineers Since most of recent jobs concentrate on specific required competencies, the author believes that it is important now to give more focusing on the skill-based learning methodology. This paper introduces an approach focusing on group categorization for the recent specific required skills of electrical engineers;then how to involve these skills in specific teaching courses. The main objectives of such approach is to intentionally improve such group skills (one by one) throughout the all program courses in order to introduce a final graduated engineer with great working readiness skills. The approach is validated and evaluated on teaching the power electronics course 1 as a case study. © 2023 IEEE.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR DEVELOPING AN ENGAGING MANAGEMENT CURRICULUM FOR UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS DURING COVID-19: A CASE OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

The rapid adoption of technology and digitization of work, which has affected every facet of life including pedagogy, has created an opportunity to develop novel ways to teach technical and management skills to students to make them industry ready. However, several studies have highlighted that students studying engineering related disciplines within higher educational institutions are often disconnected from the management units within their programme curriculum, irrespective of the level of complexity. Additionally, there are concerns that the recent shifts towards predominantly hybrid or online & blended learning (OBL) approach advocated by most institutions due to restrictions imposed by COVID-19 pandemic has further eroded the already exiguous interest levels. This study therefore attempts to understand how engineering students at a department within the University of Manchester perceive management units and the possible root causes of previously observed attitudes. The unit examined was Operations Management (MACE30461), which is mandatory for all final year undergraduates studying for graduate degrees in aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering. The fundamental rationales behind selecting this unit are its coverage of several disciplines and cohort size, with an average of approximately 350 registered engineering students per year over the last five years. To achieve the overarching aim of this study, data was innovatively obtained from five separate cohorts, through a popular continuous improvement technique - the Fishbone diagram (FBD). The benefits of this data collection approach is multi-faceted. Firstly, it reinforces learning and familiarity of the students with the applied tools, which is crucial to the achievement of the intended learning outcomes (ILOs). Secondly, it enhances direct extraction of root causes (RCs) of the identified limiters as well as their possible causal relationships. Out of approximately 1758 students that have been registered on this unit over five years, 962 returned their solutions to the exercise. As it would be very unrealistic to present all of the individual FBDs constructed by each student, a harmonised FBD was reconstructed based on all the identified RCs. The results of the study generally depict two overwhelming findings. Firstly, there is a general misconception of the meaning of engineering, as most students believe that engineering programmes should only encompass core technical elements such as thermodynamics, design, fluid mechanics, vibrations, etc. Secondly, majority of students find the contents of most management units offered to engineering students uninteresting, particularly because of a lack of well-established link between such contents and what they perceive as real engineering. The authors therefore argue for innovative teaching methods that embed tools that are coherent with core technical units through hybrid or OBL, which is both cost effective and practical given the prevailing pandemic environment. Copyright © 2022 by ASME.

Work-In-Progress: Liberian Undergraduate Engineering Students' Perceptions of the Impact of COVID-19 on their Learning Experience

The massive disruption to the global education system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has garnered educational research communities' attention by illuminating the need to investigate the pandemic's immediate and long-term effect on education. However, less is known about its impact on engineering education in developing countries such as Liberia. Guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis and Bagozzi, 1989), our research is the first step in understanding Liberian engineering students' perception of the impact of COVID-19 on their learning experiences. This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary results from 3 of the 18 participants of this study. This study focuses on the impact of the abrupt transition from face-to-face to online learning due to COVID-19 and particularly on undergraduate engineering students' learning experiences at a public university in Liberia. The research design employed to achieve this goal is a qualitative phenomenological research approach using semi-structured interview methods. Findings from our study reveal a potential two-fold challenge that needs to be addressed: Psychosocial challenges and technical challenges. Our future work will unpack these and other challenges across the other 15 participants in the study. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Features of Continuity and Change through COVID-19 in an Undergraduate Engineering Program

How does online learning at a residential college impact community building? During the Covid-19 pandemic, qualitative focus group interview data were collected at a large mid-Atlantic university with each undergraduate engineering student cohort. Students adapted relationships with peers and professors to respond to the ongoing dynamic conditions of collegiate and regional Covid-19 requirements and experiences. This qualitative research study investigates the impact of Covid-19 restrictions on the community and relational aspects of an undergraduate making and engineering design centered engineering program in the United States. The qualitative data illustrate trends in inner-cohort relationships, qualities of the engineering department, and how students developed and maintained relationships throughout the pandemic. This paper offers implications and strategies for building and maintaining community in learning environments that are experiencing rapid and dynamic shifts. The themes and patterns can provide unique insight into the aspects of community important to students' lived experiences during the portion of the pandemic when online and hybrid learning were most prevalent. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022

Can We Make Our Robot Play Soccer? Influence of Collaborating with Preservice Teachers and Fifth Graders on Undergraduate Engineering Students' Learning during a Robotic Design Process (Work in Progress)

This work-in-progress paper describes engineering students' experiences in an NSF-funded project that partnered undergraduate engineering students with pre-service teachers to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. This project aims to address an apparent gap between what is taught in academia and industry's expectations of engineers to integrate perspectives from outside their field to solve modern societal problems requiring a multidisciplinary approach. Working in small teams over Zoom, participating engineering, education, and fifth grade students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired COVID companion robots. The goal for the engineering students was to build new interprofessional skills, while reinforcing technical skills. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird BitTM hardware (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process (EDP), and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each undergraduate engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their preservice teacher and fifth grade partners. The intervention took place in Spring 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating the investigators to make critical decisions to address challenges of implementing the intervention in an online setting. This paper describes those decisions as it investigates how the cross-disciplinary, mixed-aged collaboration with preservice teachers and fifth graders impacted undergraduate engineering students' learning and investment during the design process of their robots. Preliminary results of a regression analysis revealed a relationship between the engineering students' robot rankings and post-scores on the design process knowledge survey (r = 0.92). Consistencies and a few anomalies in this pattern were explained using qualitative reflections which were analyzed to determine students' level of investment in the project, overall perceptions, and the extent to which they focused on the fifth graders' ideas in their designs. In general, robot quality was linked to both undergraduate engineering students' level of investment and whether they focused on the fifth graders' ideas in their designs. Engineering students' overall perceptions of the project were generally positive, appreciating the role of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations in their learning to brainstorm innovative solutions and interact effectively with professionals outside of engineering as they embark on tackling societal problems in the real world. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Work in Progress: Impact of COVID-19 and the Digital Divide on the Sense of Belonging for Undergraduate Engineering Students

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions of higher learning across the United States to pivot to online instruction immediately or close altogether. This transition highlighted many inequities in access to education as well as the sense of community on college campuses for the students. Earlier digital divide research focused mainly on physical access, identifying patterns of hardware access by different social identities such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Soon after, digital divide researchers began to recognize that the divide exists even when there is physical access to hardware, because the usage and the quality of usage varies (Katz & Aspden, 1996). During the COVID-19 pandemic, many students have lost access to the free, public technology resources at their college or university. These inequities in online learning and the potential impact on student success were highlighted by our team in our prior publication (Simpson, 2020). In addition to access to education, students also lose connection with their community available on college campuses. The purpose of our study was to understand the challenges of online learning and the relationship between the Digital Divide and Sense of Belonging in underrepresented students amid a global pandemic. Using qualitative research methods, we examined the questions "How does the Digital Divide currently impact Sense of Belonging and community in students?" and "What patterns will be revealed when we investigate Sense of Belonging across different social identities?" We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with current and recently graduated undergraduate engineering students. We were intentional to compose a diverse group of interview participants including students from underrepresented groups, including ethnic and gender minorities as well as first-generation students. Of the 20 participants, five self-identified as men and 15 as women;nine self-identified as Black/African American, eight as White, and three as Asian. Four were first-generation students. Four participants were rising juniors, 10 were rising seniors (one 5th year senior), and five were recent alumni (December and May 2020). We conducted first and second-cycle coding data analyses to identify themes regarding the impact of COVID-19 and Digital Divide on Sense of Belonging. Preliminary results suggest the presence of themes highlighting both victories and defeats within the realms of Digital Divide and Sense of Belonging. Digital Divide was highlighted by limitations of students' Physical Home Learning Environment, Internet Connectivity. The negative factors affecting students' Sense of Belonging included Social Isolation;Impersonal Learning;Missing Professional Opportunities, and Individual Differences. The themes highlighting factors that increased students' Sense of Belonging were: Student Organizations Impact;Togetherness in Pandemic;Group Work Benefits;and Connecting Through Tech. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique perspective for researchers to study the commonalities and differences among the experience of engineering students from diverse backgrounds. These findings will help to inform higher education administration of the impact of Sense of Belonging on college campuses and how it contributes to students' success. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Pandemic evolution in basic control courses for undergraduate engineering students

Presenting automatic control concepts to biomedical engineers is a challenging task due to the lack of background and/or motivation of many students. In this paper, a learning-by-doing experience is shown, where the COVID-19 pandemic evolution is used as a teaching project along the course. By applying this methodology, students report a better understanding of the background concepts and their possible use in applications that they feel close to their interests © 2022 IEEE.

Minimizing Communication Challenges Faced by Virtual Project Teams

During the 2020 spring semester, courses rapidly transitioned online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid transition online and transformation of team projects presented a unique opportunity to study team dynamics, specifically communication challenges, within virtual team projects. For most students, the 2020 spring semester was the first time they had to complete a virtual team project;however, with the rise in remote work in industry, many students will have jobs that include virtual work on teams. As such, investigating the communication challenges undergraduate engineering students experienced provides important insights to guide classroom instruction and tips for students working on virtual teams. Furthermore, this work has the potential to improve both virtual and in-person team project designs and increase the impact of team projects on the education of engineering undergraduate students by encouraging effective communication. We collected open-ended survey responses and conducted interviews with a range of engineering majors and class standing. We analyzed the data with a conventional qualitative content approach allowing for the development of emergent codes. Throughout the coding process, inter-rater reliability (IRR) quantitatively assessed the coding agreement across researchers until the IRR was higher than 80% for each coding category and the overall IRR across all categories was higher than 90%. The data from the interviews showed students perceived poorer team communication in the virtual environment, limiting team's effectiveness in completing tasks. Students mentioned that the environment had negative effects on the collaboration and relationship formation of the group members. Some students described strategies they adapted for improving communication, including approaches for establishing clear expectations, streamlining meetings, and building trust. Results indicate that designing a meeting structure with thorough planning documentation that designates time for social interactions to foster trust between team members is a powerful method for encouraging effective communication and overall project success. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering Mentoring Program to Enhance Gender Diversity Demonstrates Success during the COVID Pandemic

Many female undergraduate Engineering students struggle during their first and second years of college with finding their place and questioning whether they belong in Engineering. It has been shown that mentoring programs can help encourage women to stay in engineering fields. The University started a Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) mentoring program in Fall 2019, and continued it through the pandemic, during the Spring and Fall 2020 terms. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the first three semesters of the WISE mentoring program on engagement and satisfaction, as well as retention and GPA of women within the program, compared to a control group of women who did not go through the program. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the success of the program was also assessed. The program was designed to implement one-on-one peer mentoring within the WISE program, incorporate mentoring cohort activities, and provide networking opportunities with faculty and students in engineering and science disciplines. Virtual mentoring activities were also incorporated during the pandemic. The program was facilitated by a graduate student in engineering. The initial cohort in Fall 2019 had a total of 44 pairs of women consisting of freshmen mentees paired with upper class mentors within the WISE program. Despite the pandemic and incorporating virtual mentoring meetings, 50 pairs of students joined the mentoring program in Fall 2020, an increase of nearly 14%. Most of the women (82.5%) who were part of the mentoring program rated their partnership as a 3 out of 5 or better. The GPAs of the women in the mentoring program, and those who were not were not significantly different. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Undergraduate Engineering Laboratories during COVID-19 Pandemic

Laboratories have always been considered an integral part of undergraduate engineering education. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has globally affected higher education and educators are devising innovative ways to minimize the impact of the pandemic on student learning. The most popular approach of converting instruction to online is applicable for teaching theoretical knowledge. However, laboratory experiments require hands-on activities. Simulations can replace the hands-on experiments to a limited extend. Moreover, laboratory sessions involve social interaction as students work in groups, share laboratory equipment, and interact one-to-one with laboratory instructor. This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on laboratory courses in Electronics and Computer Engineering Technology (ECET) department of Indiana State University (ISU) through statistical analysis of grade distribution of students and number of experiments covered. The authors present the comparison of Fall 2019 laboratory course when the challenges of pandemic did not exist with the Fall 2020 laboratory course when the precautions for COVID-19 pandemic were observed. The comparison is done for laboratory courses taught by the same instructor in Fall 2019 and Fall 2020. Faculty members from ECET department explain the adjustments they have made to their laboratory courses to minimize the impact of the pandemic on students learning. Overall, the authors managed to cover almost all the experiments in Fall 2020 as they used to cover in Fall 2019. The statistical comparison of final grade distribution also indicates no difference between these two semesters which were conducted under quite different circumstances. The null hypothesis is that there exists no difference between the course final grades for pre-pandemic (Fall 2019) and post-pandemic (Fall 2020) semesters. The hypothesis has been tested using Chi-square goodness of fit test at p=0.05. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Examining the Impact of Interpersonal Interactions on Course-level Persistence Intentions Among Online Undergraduate Engineering Students

This research paper examines the influence of interpersonal interactions on the course-level persistence intentions of online undergraduate engineering students. Online learning is increasing in enrollment and importance in engineering education. Online courses also continue to confront issues with comparatively higher course dropout levels than face-to-face courses. This study correspondingly explores relevant student perceptions of their online course experiences to better understand the factors that contribute to students' choices to remain in or drop out of their online undergraduate engineering courses. Data presented in this study were collected during fall 2019 and spring 2020 from three ABET-accredited online undergraduate engineering courses at a large southwestern public university: electrical engineering, engineering management, and software engineering. The data was collected during the pre-COVID time. Participants were asked to respond to surveys at 12-time points during their 7.5-week online course. Each survey measured students' perceptions of course LMS dialog, perceptions of instructor practices, and peer support for completing the course. Participants also reported their intentions to persist in the course during each survey administration. A multi-level modeling analysis revealed that the Perceptions of course LMS dialog, Perceptions of Instructor Practices, and Perceptions of Peer Support are related to Perceptions of course-level Persistence Intentions. Time was also a significant predictor of persistence intentions and indicated that the course persistence intentions decrease towards the end of the course. A multi-level modeling analysis revealed that LMS dialog, perceptions of instructor practices, and peer support are related to course persistence intentions. Time was also a significant predictor of persistence intentions and indicated that the course persistence intentions decrease towards the end of the course. Additionally, interactions between demographic variables and other predictors (Perceptions of course LMS dialogue, Perceptions of Instructor Practices, and Perceptions of Peer Support) were significant. With the increase in perceptions of course LMS dialog, perceptions of instructor practices, and perceptions of peer support, there was a relatively smaller increase in the persistence intentions of veterans than non-veterans. There is relatively more increase in the persistence intentions of females than males as their perceptions of instructor practices increase. Finally, increasing perceptions of peer support led to a relatively larger increase in the persistence intentions of non-transfer students than transfer students and a relatively smaller increase in persistence intentions of students working full-time than other students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

What Role do Civil Engineering Students See for their Profession in the COVID-19 Response?

Engineering education typically focuses on technical knowledge rather than ethical development. When ethics are incorporated into curriculum, the focus is usually on microethics concerning issues that arise in particular contexts and interactions between individuals, rather than macroethics that address broad societal concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity to assess macroethical understanding because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront of the response. In this study, we aim to understand students' awareness of unjust systems and the ethical responsibilities of engineers. At the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, in April 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities. We asked students to explain what they perceived to be the role of the engineering profession in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on 84 responses of undergraduate civil engineering students across two universities. We used qualitative analyses (deductive and inductive coding) to explore responses in which macroethics are present and those responses that they are not. We then use inferential statistics to test whether the presence of macroethics in responses is associated with sociodemographic factors. We show that there are statistically significant differences across student responses given certain sociodemographic factors. Responses from women focused more on macroethics as compared to responses from men. There was also a difference in responses between the universities surveyed, potentially capturing that institutional differences may impact students' macroethical development. Implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content and identifying which student demographic groups would benefit most from intentional macroethical content in coursework. Further it is worth exploring in the future if increasing diversity and representation of women in engineering may impact the engineering industry's focus on macroethics based on these findings. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Development of an At-home Metal Corrosion Laboratory Experiment for STEM Outreach in Biomaterials During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, many universities and outreach programs have switched to online learning platforms, which inhibits students from completing formative hands-on experiments. To address this, we developed a series of at-home experiments for undergraduate engineering students and adapted one of these experiments for outreach purposes. This experiment was well received by middle school students in the Young Eisner Scholars (YES) Program and resulted in significant learning gains by pre/post-test assessment. Additionally, students showed enhanced attitudes toward science after completing their at-home experiments, as measured by pre/post-surveys. These results motivate the use of similar at-home experiments with virtual instruction to remotely teach engineering concepts to diverse, underserved communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Based-on simulation training on ventilation calculation for the reduction of occupational risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection

This paper addresses a new learning methodological approach compatible with e-learning and m-learning for undergraduate engineering students to learn the ventilation requirements for the prevention of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in the workplace and to develop the critical sense to design ventilation systems in accordance with the standards that minimize the biological risk. Thus, a learning activity based on a simulation of infection risks is proposed in which three different initial ventilation requirements hypotheses were considered to calculate the necessary ventilation in the workplace. Subsequently, a simulation was carried out to obtain the probability of contagion in each of them and, in this way, to obtain information to make adequate decisions and improve critical thinking in the context of industrial hygiene. © 2021 ACM.