Remotely Teaching Engineering During a Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 caused schools to close their campuses and switch to online classes for the Spring term with very little notice. Many institutions continued to hold online courses for the balance of 2020. This mixed methods study is a snapshot of what technologies, methods, and course delivery tools were employed to teach engineering courses online in Spring 2020. The study included 40 professors and lecturers from 35 institutions and 25 countries. A 27-question survey regarding how the educators coped with the sudden change from in-person to online teaching was created and uploaded to Survey Monkey. Of particular interest were hands-on engineering lab courses and the equipment students used to remotely complete the lab experiments. The results indicate that Zoom and Moodle were the most popular course delivery tools among those that participated in the study. Many institutions used more than one course delivery technology. Arduino “shield compatible” (not actual Arduino) development kits from several manufacturers were the most popular type of hardware used in hands-on engineering lab courses. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.