ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
The importance of soft skills in the professional work of an engineer is becoming increasingly important, even more so since the emergence of Covid-19 boosted the digitization of all professional sectors. In order for future engineers to acquire this type of skills, it is necessary for engineering professors to have an optimal level of technical and transversal skills. This article analyzes the assessment made by a group of engineering professors about their degree of development of soft skills and describes gender gaps in these assessments. Based on a self-created survey to evaluate different families of soft skills relevant to engineering education, a sample of 284 Latin American engineering professors reported: 1) high evaluations of their soft skills and 2) the existence of gender gaps in the families of work behavior and social skills in favor of females. This gap is especially wide among participants younger than 45 and older than 65 in the social skills family. In addition, females also rate their work motivation skills higher, except in the 55–64 age range.
ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
Learning statistics online during the COVID-19 pandemic became a challenging experience for most students in higher institutions. This study aimed to measure the students' level of resilience and determine its influencing factors in distance learning during the pandemic. Data from an availability sampling of 129 engineering students were gathered with the aid of a Google form survey. The study used some descriptive measures and employed a regression modeling approach to extract detailed information from the survey data. Results showed that, on average, students were considered "resilient" in learning statistics during the pandemic. Statistical models revealed that sex, number of family members, household assets, and level of how conducive learning at home are significant predictors of students' resilience. Additionally, the model showed that male students are more resilient compared to female students. Lastly, more family members and household assets can increase students' resilience level as well as a comfortable place (at home) for learning. Hence, the study suggests that teachers must strengthen the interest of students especially female students by showing them a good attitude that promotes well-being. Furthermore, teachers must regularly monitor their learning progress, and provide comfortable and reasonable learning activities suitable for distance learning.
ABSTRACT
Results of a longitudinal research carried out within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest) to identify the dynamics of student preferences regarding the teaching-learning-assessment process are presented in this paper. The research was carried out throughout one full generation (four academic years) of students. The results showed that the academic maturity of the students (defined as the transition to a higher academic year) majorly impacts only the students' preferences regarding some aspects like the way of conducting the laboratory and project applications, the subject's final evaluation procedure, the fining of academic deception and the mandatory evaluation of professors' activity by students. The studied generation (2016-2019) is the last one before the COVID-19 pandemic, before the paradigm shifts through the sudden transition to fully online activities highlighting the relevance of this research. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The objective of the research was to determine the relationship between the type of participation, collaborative organizational structure of the groups and the learning of mathematics, in a group task carried out in virtual form by the context of health emergency by COVID19. During four weeks, eight working groups composed of three environmental engineering students worked four activities on the analysis of the variation of functions. The working meetings were developed by ZOOM and WhatsApp. It was found that reasoning and argumentation as well as problem solving is favored when students express new ideas or explanations about any doubt or when they address the content of the task, especially in groups with an integrative organizational structure. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The present study draws from the need to face twenty-first-century Engineering students' lack of oral communication skills in digital environments. The existing deficiencies became evident during the months of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when most communication processes, both in academic and professional settings, involved the use of digital means. On this basis, the study aims at identifying ESP university students' self-reported strengths and weaknesses to build persuasive digital oral speeches using a self-assessment rubric that was specifically designed to evaluate their communication skills in digital environments. The rubric comprised 22 items distributed between five significant areas of knowledge: building communication skills (content/cognition and linguistic area), performing communication skills (physical and socio-emotional areas) and creating digital content skills (technical area). The results reveal that about 40% of the students considered their level of digital communication skills deficient, being the linguistic, socio-emotional and physical areas of communication the most affected ones. The ultimate intention of the study is to help students become aware of their command of oral skills in digital environments –their specific strengths and weaknesses– to help them thrive in both traditional and digital communication. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Due to the impact of the pandemic situation, applying online learning methods become an immediate response to tackle the difficulties in teaching and learning, including software engineering courses. Online video meeting platforms (e.g., MS Teams, Webex) are popularly adopted as a medium between instructors and students to conduct online learning classes and they have been modified to provide functions supporting remote teaching and learning activities such as the breakout rooms for conducting group activities. However, maintaining student engagement is still a challenging problem in online learning. Especially, drawing students' attention and enhancing their experience during in-class activities (e.g., project presentations, group discussions) is critical to achieving of activities' objective. Virtual Reality (VR) has been considered to be a potential answer to this online teaching and learning enhancement. This study evaluates the benefit of adopting VR in software engineering class presentation activities. The evaluation result from 3 courses shows that VR improves the online learning and presentation experience by offering visual attractions and presence to students. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Numerous firms across the globe are now fully utilizing a variety of cutting-edge online communication platform technologies as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic. The usage of various online communication tools by students and instructors is required by higher education institutions in order to maintain an uninterrupted educational process. The goal of this study is to discover more about how university students perceive the advantages and challenges of online learning. It will also look at how students prefer online learning based on prior experiences. In order to determine the degree of agreement among the respondents based on their feedback comments, the 238 data sets that were collected were analysed using the average index value. Frequency analysis was carried out to examine the frequencies and Average Index Value of the respondents in relation to the survey variables. According to students, the most important advantages of online learning were the replay function, which allowed students to access lecture slides and recorded video at a later time to review the courses, and the flexibility of time, which allowed them to access the lecture materials whenever there was a reliable internet connection. On the other hand, inability to maintain concentration in online classes and a lack of self-discipline were the most frequent obstacles with online learning. When it comes to the preferences of students for online learning, the vast majority of them favoured synchronous learning and wanted access to recorded lecture videos and lecture slides after the class for subsequent topic revision. The research findings contribute to the body of knowledge on students' views and preferences toward online learning by considering the perspective of diploma students. © 2023,International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Previous studies have shown that secondary school students may have misconceptions about geological scientific information. By the end of secondary education these misconceptions may remain unresolved. As a result, students enter university studies and still hold them. Students of engineering, as for example civil engineering, are no exception. The aim of this study was to investigate and analyse misconceptions of this specific target group. A closed questionnaire was designed and given to 102 University students who attended the 2nd semester course "Geology for Civil Engineers” in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Patras. The questionnaire was designed and validated according to previous research findings and implemented through google forms that were prepared and given electronically to the students to fill them online. The participants completed the questionnaire on the principles of geology electronically due to Covid-19 conditions. The results showed that in some questions most of the students answered correctly while in others there were many wrong answers, which revealed their misconceptions in geology. Many misconceptions were traced especially regarding mineral properties like color and luster. An important observation was that a notable number of students confused hardness with brittleness and as a result they expressed their belief that hard minerals are hard to break. Gender and age differences were tested using appropriate statistical tests. In cases that there was a significant difference between the genders, women were the ones with higher percentage of correct answers. The results may be seen in relation to educational practices. © 2022 International Multidisciplinary Scientific Geoconference. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Covid19 outbreak has seen eLearning becoming a viable alternative to the traditional face-to-face teaching globally. Software Engineering education has not been an exception to these changes. The use of multimedia enhanced eLearning communities is also on the increase in the teaching of software engineering. However, there is limited research on the acceptance of such technologies by African learners. Some of the multimedia being used to enhance these learning communities includes animated pedagogical agents (PAs) combining text. animation, audio, and video. Considering learner differences and aiming to achieve personalized learning, there is a need for institutions to understand how such technologies are being accepted by learners and the factors that influence the acceptance. This study focuses on the acceptance of pedagogical agent enhanced eLearning communities by Southern African learners in the teaching of Software Engineering. The aim of the study is to identify the factors that influence the acceptance of such communities. This will help eLearning designers to try and address the needs of learners in different contexts to achieve personalized learning. This study involved 137 software engineering students from South Africa and Zimbabwe who were being introduced to eLearning community enhanced with PAs. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology2 (UTAUT2) was used in this study. The study revealed that only performance expectancy, and hedonic motivation constructs had an effect on behavioral intention to use these eLearning communities enhanced with PAs. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The state of emergency declared in many countries due to the pandemic led universities to consider the incursion of technological tools to give continuity to the teaching and learning process;therefore it is significant to explore results regarding the application of augmented reality (AR) in education. The objective of the research is to generate knowledge from the systematic review of the literature framed in the context of virtual teaching in the midst of COVID-19. A bibliographic review was carried out under a mixed approach, exploratory and descriptive level. The findings showed that the application of AR in learning is not exclusive to any engineering specialty, but, on the contrary, it is versatile and adapts to various curricular contents;Also, the way in which augmented reality is applied is more focused on the use of mobile augmented reality (mobile AR) technology with markerless activation. In addition, it was identified that the factors that were analysed to demonstrate the contribution of AR were: the effectiveness of learning, the predisposition to use AR and the motivation generated by AR. With which it can be concluded that AR in this context has managed to position itself as a learning resource that goes beyond a tool linked to a virtual classroom, since it allows the student to transcend towards immersion in environments with high contextual fidelity. Future research should address which factors influence the improvement of mobile AR activation sensitivity, in different contexts. © Authors.
ABSTRACT
Since a pandemic was declared in 2020, Irish higher education institutions transitioned from on-campus to online delivery. This disruption created challenges to students' acquisition of hard and soft skills. With greater employee mobility, there is an increased emphasis on soft skills development, especially those skills that enhance employability, i.e., creativity, leadership, communication, innovation, teamwork, adaptability, resilience, time management, organization, self motivation, ability to work under pressure, critical thinking and problem solving and organizational ability. The purpose of this study was to understand the effects of COVID-19 on fears for the future and on soft skills development. In this study, 111 Software Engineering university students were surveyed. The results show heightened fears for the future with regard to job opportunities, the loss of time and the lack of control. While females reported to being more fearful, they also reported enhanced empathy and strengthened resilience. Postgraduate students were less fearful about the future compared to undergraduate students whilst also reporting better time management and organization skills. This study showed that despite disruptions to education, the Software Engineering students self-reported enhancements to resilience, empathy, time management and organizational skills, with the greatest impact on resilience and time management. © 2023 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
University studies were also significantly affected by the pandemic. The first-year students had already spent the last months of high school, which are especially important for graduation, in distance learning. In Hungary, the graduation procedure was changed due to the epidemic. Education was completely digital in hybrid form: the lectures were held online, and the seminars were attended in-person and from September of 2021 again in-person. Our research team has been monitoring learning time and effectiveness for years using the EduBase online educational platform, which provides a framework for all teaching aids for the calculus subject. In our research, we analysed the learning processes and their effectiveness of mechatronic and energy engineering students who were admitted to BME in 2020. The results were compared with the learning habits of the class of 2018, with whom a detailed study was also performed. It can be stated that the pandemic greatly influenced the learning time: students took advantage of the available practice opportunities to a greater extent in digital education, which did not reduce the practice time during the end-of-semester spurt, thus, learning became more balanced. Considering the high school results, it can be observed that on average, those who took advanced level subjects spent more time practicing, even though they had already mastered some calculus in high school. In addition, test scores also influenced practice time, while students coped successfully even with the more difficult tasks. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In an online or offline classroom, it might be difficult to ensure student engagement and learning during and after the COVID-19 epidemic. The learning of global engineers, need to engage effective teaching and learning practices in higher education is required. The best way to learn is to teach. Learning by teaching others is extremely effective method. To enhance the learning of engineering students, a pilot study is aims to exam in the effectiveness of the freshmen engineering students' engagement in learning using peer tutoring. In addition, considered the performance of tutees (slow learners) guided by the identified tutors (fast learners) of the same group for peer tutoring. For that the students are engaged in the practice of learning by teaching, understanding and retaining the knowledge while comparing the students who are in existing learning. A peer teaching method is effective learning method by involving the student in group presentations combined with cooperative learning. In this paper a review of related literature focusing on active learning methods –like learning by teaching, peer tutoring, team presentations in engineering education are done. The results strongly endorse learning through teaching by the student and for the student throughout the practice of peer tutoring in a pilot course study of Applied Physics. © 2022, Rajarambapu Institute Of Technology. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The move to online teaching and learning at higher institutions because of the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020 challenged engineering programs to change how they have been conducting their assessments. Before Covid, this process was done to check whether module outcomes are achieved and provide a grade for the student. Nowadays continuous assessments are used instead of summative assessments and civil engineering schools must now re-think the whole purpose of the assessment process. This paper reports on a study which was designed to find out if assessments given to engineering students are improving and enhancing their understanding and promote better learning. Our important goal as engineering lecturers is to prepare students for a professional life through assessment, teaching and learning. The study focused on the small number of students who study civil engineering technology at the University of Johannesburg. Assessment within the engineering discipline is ordinarily orientated towards illustrating competence in particular assignments utilizing only conventional or traditional assessment methods such as tests and exams. This work aimed to assist students to increase their learning potential from assessments and lecturers to provide constructive assessment feedback. The main research question was to find out the extent that students learn from assessment and feedback in the Theory of Structures module under civil engineering technology. The vehicles that were used to collect data includes lecture observations, questionnaires, and interviews. The research data collection was conducted over few weeks of the second semester with first year students doing Theory of Structures. Three types of data were collected from this study. The first was a semester test results and feedback. After the test, focus group interviews were conducted to students' feedback on the test process and they also gave details about how they found questions and solutions. The third instrument of data collection was the use of questionnaires in the form of online surveys. The analysis of data started by documenting the results obtained from the interviews, and online questionnaires. The audio recordings from interviews were transcribed using Otter software. The transcribed text was then merged with findings from questionnaires and analyzed using open coding by Quirkos software. The study showed that more work still needs to be done to educate students about the importance of assessment as the findings showed that there are students who still focus on grades during assessment and not real learning. Nowadays feedback is even more important since most students are using blended or online learning which requires support and guidance from the lecturer. Although the focus was on small size of sample or few participants compared to the faculty of engineering student population, the study still managed to provide findings that will be applied to improve assessment and feedback practices. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has reemphasised the potential importance of having a unit or a formal structure that supports engineering students and faculty. Maintaining the integrity of teaching and learning during the pandemic necessitated collaboration, new skills, and new ways of thinking, for which many universities and faculties were unprepared. It is proposed that an Engineering Education Unit (EEU) would be able to facilitate new learning and thinking, an integrated view of collaboration and exploring new technologies. Therefore, this position paper provides a case for the establishment of an EEU and was aimed at answering the following research question: How can we position the integration of an Engineering Education Unit in South African universities which do not currently have such a formal structure? As a result, this paper aims to position how Engineering Education Research (EER) and engineering education practice can be integrated rather than separated. Furthermore, the scholarship of Engineering Education (EE) presents itself as an exciting space for collaborative thinking between engineering education scholars, engineering practitioners and engineering students. The researchers center their argument around three theoretically informed concepts in this position paper, namely (I) Community participation for skills development, (2) Crafting methodological relevance, (3) and Emerging economies such as the 4th Industrial Revolution (4thIR) / Industry 4. 0. Although several studies have examined clear distinctions between engineering education as practice-based and engineering education as research-focused, a strong focus on how an alignment of both fields could inform the agenda of an EEU has been lacking. As such, this position paper provides additional insights into the ways in which theory can inform the teaching and practice of engineering curriculum by establishing a Unit that is dedicated to the practical application of engineering education research. The Unit would be a place for engineering faculty to seek meaningful exploration in building community towards equitable, social participatory, engineering education learning experiences. The growing number of local and global institutions that have been engaging extensively with work in both the engineering education space and the education research space, support the justification for the establishment of such a Unit. It is envisaged that other universities can use the results of this position paper as motivation to establish their own EEU. Similarly, it can facilitate an understanding of the possible benefits of such a Unit. The anticipated benefits of such a Unit are: (i) furthering the engineering education research agenda, (ii) breaking down silos, (iii) interdisciplinary collaboration, and (iv) increasing student success. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This study explores First Year Engineering students' perceptions towards online speaking assessment amidst COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure that the education process remained uninterrupted during the pandemic, schools and higher learning institutions were forced to shift to full time remote teaching and learning which has indirectly impacted assessment and evaluation of all courses. This study aims to examine first year engineering students' views on their experience having online speaking assessment amidst covid-19 pandemic. Investigating students' perceptions as the end user towards online assessment is highly crucial to determine the effectiveness of teaching and learning. A quantitative method of study was conducted with questionnaire derived from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was adopted to collect responses from 163 undergraduate Diploma engineering students doing their first semester in Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Malaysia. The key findings indicated that the students were well receptive of online speaking assessment and were fully ready to have online speaking assessment in the future. The study also discovered that students' perceived self-efficacy towards online speaking assessment was low and there was significant difference in perceptions between students from rural and students from urban area on online speaking assessment. This study is important to higher learning institutions to serve as a guide in making planning related to implementation of online speaking assessment during the pandemic. This research is also significant for its contribution towards language teaching practices in higher learning institution and will be helpful for the educators to identify ways to enhance students' online assessment experience for an effective teaching and learning. Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
During the first lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic, project-based learning (PBL) had to be implemented remotely. To gain knowledge on this learning context, we monitored motivation (in Self-Determination Theory framework), flow, social identification and self-rated performance during a 10-day project conducted with 281 engineering students. Final grades were also collected as objective performance indicators. Results show that intrinsic and identified motivation, flow, self-rated performance and group identification increased throughout the project, which suggests that remote PBL stimulated students' needs for autonomy and competence without hindering their need for relatedness. Furthermore, the analysis of significant predictors of teams' and individuals' performance draw avenues for improving PBL and stimulating intrinsic and identified motivation, for the subject and for the project, at the right time along the program. © Holder: Andréa Boisadan, Céline Viazzi, Christophe Bourgognon, Bernard Blandin & Stéphanie Buisine.