Design and Evaluation of Undergraduate Feedback-control System Course in Distance Learning

ABSTRACT

This paper is a work-in-progress (WIP) paper. COVID19 pandemic profoundly changed the way educators teach and the way students learn. Our institution, the New York City College of Technology, abruptly switched to distance learning mode in Spring 2020 and continues to offer all courses online in Fall 2020. This paper presents the redesign and evaluation of an undergraduate Feedback Control System course to adapt to distance learning. Feedback Control System course is the last required course for the Bachelor of Technology (BTech) program in Computer Engineering Technology (CET), which has a 3-hour lecture lesson and a 3-hour lab session every week. Due to our BTech students' diverse mathematical backgrounds, students think this course is demanding even in the traditional face-to-face teaching mode. Teaching such a mathematically involved class in the distance learning mode poses significant challenges to both the instructors and the students. This paper documents our re-structure and redesign process of both the lecture and lab components to facilitate students' remote learning experience, satisfy the ABET accreditation criteria and maintain our pre-set learning standard. The online characteristic gives the instructors the freedom and a framework to teach classes in various delivery modes via synchronous lectures (like virtual meetings) and asynchronous online supplementary resources (for example, Blackboard). The arrangements we made to adjust to the distance learning mode include a) decomposition of the course context into three modules and clear specification of the corresponding learning objectives of each module;b) combination of different technologies to create friendly and inclusive learning environment;c) frequent assessment of students' performance via online quizzes/tests;and d) carefully-designed laboratory assignments via MATLAB simulations that are able to demonstrate the entire feedback control process. A comparison of students' performance under the traditional face-to-face learning mode and the new distance learning mode is conducted. Based on assessment results, we will evaluate the effectiveness of our current teaching methodology/plan developed for distance learning and possibly identify potential areas for further improvement. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021