Teaching and Learning during COVID: Lessons Learned and Future Impacts

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educational institutions and many industries to move to an online communication model. Educators and students across the world, for the most part, have been working to accommodate socially distanced and virtual schools while addressing the associated fears and concerns. For educational institutions, online synchronous meetings using Zoom or similar software platforms have replaced face-to-face teachings. The approach to handle the teaching disruptions caused by the pandemic is somewhat similar among educational institutions. The disturbance seems to be more manageable for the lecture-based courses than the laboratory classes. This paper is based on our experience in teaching electrical engineering courses. We observed several sudden changes that we contributed to this disturbance, among them a drop in student satisfaction and learning achievements. Since the only difference between the pre-pandemic and pandemic period was the delivery methodology, to better understand the root of the problem, we constructed four research questions and applied the available data for student learning outcomes for three different electrical engineering courses with different delivery mechanisms. The data indicate that interventions that will make the courses more interactive will have the highest impact. The paper concludes with an observation regarding the enrollment numbers during the pandemic and discusses some possible scenarios. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.