The lockdown opened engineering educators’ eyes to valuable teaching tools, new ways to connect with students, and a couple of worrisome trends.
By Thomas K. Grose
George Okere welcomed this fall’s return to traditional in-person teaching at the University of Cincinnati, where he is an associate professor of civil engineering. But last year’s shift to virtual classes acquainted him with one technique that he plans to keep: breakout rooms. These added variety to his courses and went down well with students. “We know from experience that students have short attention spans and they very easily get bored with long-winded lectures,” he says. While he set up breakout rooms remotely during the pandemic, this year he plans to introduce them in the classroom face-to-face.
Okere is not alone in coming away from the months of remote instruction with a proven new educational tool. Despite the current resumption of normal classes at campuses across the country, many engineering educators say they discovered novel teaching methods and additional ways to engage with students during the shutdown. These changes—ranging from technology tools to student-friendly office hours—are worth preserving, they say.
To be sure, COVID-19 brought a fair measure of misery to engineering faculty and students alike. Many academics, lacking the necessary understanding of information technology, struggled in their efforts to provide a smooth transition to online learning, several University of Pittsburgh academics reported at ASEE’s 2021 virtual conference.
But the switch to virtual instruction prompted more than a few educators to defy higher education’s hidebound traditions and channel their training as engineers—designing under constraint, testing new systems, failing, and finding solutions. In doing so, they embraced technology and teaching techniques they had previously ignored. “I think some of this will stick,” says Michael Prince, a chemical engineering professor at Bucknell University and co-director of the National Effective Teaching Institute.
Students, for their part, encountered problems with internet access for conferencing, challenges with faculty-student communication, at-home distractions, and the need to adjust to different virtual teaching styles. Still, research presented at ASEE’s Annual Conference found that while most students preferred in-person classes, they enjoyed many elements of remote learning. In a survey Okere conducted of some fifty students in two construction courses, respondents said they appreciated such features as being able to rewatch lectures and learn at their own pace. The professor is now considering giving students in his in-person classes that same opportunity by posting recorded lectures online.
So, which pandemic-forged changes are likely to be keepers? That proved to be a hot topic at the ASEE conference. A review of presentations and interviews with educators revealed a number of changes that academics are likely to make permanent, plus other lessons—not all of them encouraging—from the lockdown period. Below are some highlights.
Videos and Simulations
When Rowan University went into lockdown, Sarah K. Bauer, three colleagues, and a team of students ramped up and expanded work already underway to make three-dimensional simulations as instruction modules for four civil engineering subdisciplines. They reasoned that many engineering concepts are hard for students to understand when presented in two-dimensional visual material and diagrams. “There is a need for animated and simulation video modules because they help students engage in 3D space,” explains Bauer, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
The new simulations covered a variety of concepts. One was a three-dimensional depiction of tunneling, complemented by pictures and videos of actual tunneling work. Another, aimed at helping students learn about design optimization of transportation systems, presented an animation showing what happens to a vehicle traveling on a roadway with varying design parameters, including curves and on/off ramps. In addition to producing simulation modules, Bauer and her team created a series of videos that covered the basics of lab courses. The videos showed faculty or students using lab equipment or doing field tests to conduct experiments and collect data—tasks students normally would do in person. “One big takeaway is that, even as we head back to the classroom, these videos are still very important for learning and we’ll continue to use them,” Bauer says. And while students who are visual learners gained the most from them, a survey of students found that “more than 90 percent thought they added value.”
Alan Cheville is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Bucknell University who is researching the opportunities and pitfalls of digital teaching tools. He and many of his colleagues now realize that they want students to do more work outside the classroom to make better use of class time. Simulations can be a part of that effort. Cheville cites a faculty member in his department who plans to continue giving students more simulation assignments so he can spend lab time focusing on the applications of the technologies, not the basics. For example, for a course on electronic devices, he created a simulation of a basic transistor’s op-amp circuits so students could look for irregular behaviors.
At Northern Arizona University, John Tingerthal developed a virtual lab for a surveying and geomatics class based on a series of videos that placed each student as a notetaker on a survey crew. The learning experience proved so robust that the modules will be used in conjunction with hands-on data collection in a post-pandemic future. Tingerthal, a professor of civil engineering, construction management, and environmental engineering, says the virtual lab is also an option for distance learners and serves as a backup when bad weather or other circumstances make field work impossible.
Flipped Classrooms
A close cousin to the use of videos and simulations is the “inverted” classroom, which requires students to watch recorded lectures ahead of class and use classroom time to practice working with the material. “Many faculty will now and forever do flipped classrooms. That is a big takeaway, because they avoided doing them in the past,” says Mary Besterfield-Sacre, a professor of industrial engineering and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She and ASEE President-Elect Jenna P. Carpenter, founding dean and professor of engineering at Campbell University, put together an ASEE conference session called Silver Linings that focused on positive changes that emerged during the pandemic.
One reason that many instructors avoided inverting their classes in the past, Carpenter says, “is it takes a zillion hours to create these videos—but now they’re made.” And it’s not just recording lectures that takes time and effort, she adds; it’s also creating components like discussion boards and quizzes. Instructors will stick with flipped classes this fall “because they now have all of these materials available to use to support it.”
Many also have the equipment to make new videos. Some schools installed video recording equipment in their classrooms; others covered the costs of faculty buying the gear and software they needed. Campbell did some of both. Carpenter, for instance, purchased a large iPad and used Doceri software to record lectures with a whiteboard. Panopto software was available to host or post videos and incorporate them into a course’s Blackboard site. Campbell also tried portable carts with cameras attached, but “to be honest, this is not a great approach,” because of poor quality, Carpenter reports. Okere bought his own lightboard to record lectures, and the university reimbursed him.
Online Faculty-Student Contact
Use of software and websites that facilitated communication between faculty and students mushroomed during the pandemic. Online tutoring and advising became the norm. Many instructors think it worked so well they plan to continue an online office presence. Cheville sees advantages in helping students and faculty members connect remotely: “Students who in the past were reluctant to talk to professors seem to be finding it easier to reach out to faculty online to get help.” Instructors also found that making themselves available in the evening, when students were often most active, works best because “it really gives more students opportunities,” Besterfield-Sacre says. Restricting in-person office hours to sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. used to inconvenience students. By adjusting hours to better meet their needs, “I find that more students will come, including those who never came before, and they’re willing to hang out in your office for an hour,” Carpenter says.
Cheating Worries
While students’ increased use of Zoom and other online communication tools is likely to continue, some go-to websites have stoked worries about cheating. Chegg, for example, is a homework-help subscription service that provides answers to students’ questions in as little as thirty minutes. Cheville thinks Chegg can be useful for isolated students who need help understanding difficult concepts, but says, “It’s arguable that it is doing students’ homework for them, so they’re not learning.” Indeed, Geoffrey Recktenwald, of Michigan State University’s mechanical engineering department, and PhD student Eli Broemer looked at tests taken by a group of more than 200 mechanical engineering students and found that the rate of cheating increased when testing was moved online. As the pair conclude in an ASEE conference paper, “Chegg is used primarily for cheating and not studying.” The business is not unique, they note: “Other companies, student groups, and informal networks provide similar services.”
An earlier study by two researchers in the Computer Department at Imperial College London concluded: “The growing number of requests indicates that students are using Chegg for assessment and exam help frequently and in a way that is not considered permissible by universities.” Chegg insisted to Inside Higher Ed that it is “absolutely not a cheating site and is designed to support student learning.” The site has an honor code prohibiting cheating and offers a program, Honor Shield, that lets instructors submit test questions in advance so they can be blocked during exam periods. Another platform, Course Hero, provides access to old tests, homework problems, class notes, and the like. While some instructors think the site is also a form of cheating, Cheville contends it, too, can be useful for students when they lack a campus social network. “Students are finding new ways to communicate to get help. This can be good and bad, but overall, I think it’s for the better,” he says.
Learning Management Systems
Pre-pandemic, engineering educators had been relatively slow to pick up on learning management systems (LMSs), but that quickly changed during the lockdown. “Oddly enough, engineering faculty were not early adopters” of the software, which is used to house and manage classroom content, Besterfield-Sacre says. “But the use of LMSs will now and forever be there. Gone are the days of handing out syllabi.” The ASEE conference offered examples of the benefits. At Pitt, for instance, the software was used in conjunction with Flex-Model-based hybrid courses and became a key component for course delivery. Providing an organized structure for announcements, due dates, course material availability, and grading, the system proved highly popular with students. A paper by several Pitt engineering academics urged that their fellow instructors “continue to utilize these LMS communication and organizational features even when online courses return to in-person instruction.” Besides their use as organizational tools, LMSs provide data that can be used to figure out when most students engage with online courses or are most active on discussion boards, according to Virginia Tech faculty members and students. Instructors can then pick the best times to connect with students.
Seminars and Guest Speakers
Online seminars are almost certainly here to stay. Many engineering instructors have a wish list of people they would love to have as guest speakers, but in the past, time and expense—especially travel costs—made it impossible to bring in most of them. But when the pandemic made online seminars the only option, it opened the floodgates. “Guest speakers from California to England” were suddenly available, Besterfield-Sacre says. “We never had that opportunity before, even if you did have a big pot of money, because no one was willing to take that much time, so the focus was on local people.” Pitt’s engineering school hosts an annual student capstone project contest, and bringing in industry judges, even local ones, was often a chore because of scheduling constraints. “But now that they can do it remotely, on their own time, we’re getting responses from all over.”
Bucknell’s Prince gives a lot of faculty workshops on engineering teaching. In the past, he shied away from doing them online; the concept didn’t appeal to him. “I am quite the Luddite,” he admits. He regularly turned down invitations because of travel and time constraints—but now, because he’s had to conduct sessions virtually, he can accept more. “I don’t enjoy them as much as face-to-face workshops, but the convenience is great. So my workshops will stay online for a while.”
Many schools also discovered that the convenience and ubiquity of non-classroom online platforms worked so well that they will become permanent fixtures. Penn State’s engineering college is keeping its student orientation sessions online. And the engineering college at Marshall University says its online student recruitment and outreach efforts will continue.
Grading Software
“Faculty are always concerned about time—there is never enough of it,” Cheville says. So during the pandemic, many turned to AI-assisted grading software, such as Gradescope. When they spent less time grading papers and exams, they could give students more and better feedback about their work, he says. While the pandemic may have accelerated faculty reliance on grading software, it was already gaining traction with overworked instructors, as Prism reported in December 2019, before the public health crisis began its rampage in the United States. Another helpful software tool is Perusall, which assigns reading material and uses artificial intelligence to grade students’ comments. One result of its use that Cheville appreciated is that students did more reading before class.
Class Design
Between the spring of 2020 and the fall term, all Michigan Tech faculty were trained not only in online instruction but also course design, says Leonard Bohmann, the professor of electrical and computer engineering who is also the school’s associate dean for academic affairs. “In addition to learning the technology, they all learned the concept of backward design of a course, by starting with the learning objectives.” Each classroom activity is designed to bolster a learning outcome, and less emphasis is placed on extraneous material. The result is a more focused, student-centered course. “It is a fairly simple concept, but it’s not something that is typically taught in an engineering PhD program,” he says. Bohmann expects this will be a lasting change, because it shifted an instructor’s mindset from focusing on what needs to be covered to what students should learn. “So this has expanded and fundamentally changed the conversation about student learning on campus.”
Mental Health
Last year, not only did students have to handle the stress of making an abrupt move to remote learning, they were further burdened with worries about the potential impact of the virus on themselves, family, and friends. Additionally, some students faced financial pressures, including those whose homes lacked reliable computer equipment or internet access. The political upheaval that churned through 2020—including the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as increasing anger over police violence and injustice—also had many students on edge. “We found that mental health issues were increasing at an exponential rate,” Besterfield-Sacre says, and the rigors of engineering exacerbated the problem. Adds Carpenter: “A lot of the issues were already there, but faculty were less aware of them. Now they are. The hidden stresses were there, but now they’re out in the open. Now we’re obliged to deal with the issue.”
Accordingly, many schools made efforts to help ease the mental pressures their students were facing. Pitt’s engineering school, for example, is considering the addition of social workers to its staff to help students work through their mental health challenges. It’s possible that as the pandemic ebbs, so will concerns about student mental health, but Besterfield-Sacre doesn’t think so. “These baseline mental health issues won’t go away; we were letting too many slip by the wayside,” she says.
Thomas K. Grose, Prism’s chief correspondent, is based in the United Kingdom.
Design by Francis Igot
Rapid Transition
Responding to COVID, a Canadian engineering school put preparation for virtual learning “on steroids” while keeping a major curriculum reform on track.
By Thomas K. Grose
In spring 2020, the faculty and staff at McMaster University’s engineering school already had their hands full with an ambitious overhaul of the Hamilton, Ontario, school’s first-year curriculum. The redesigned program due to launch in the fall, called the Pivot, scrapped the traditional top-down teaching model in favor of experiential peer-to-peer learning, multidisciplinary teamwork, and collaboration. Four large introductory classes were distilled into one 13-credit-hour course. Then the pandemic hit, forcing McMaster, like colleges and universities across North America, to shut down almost overnight and switch to computer-based remote instruction. The Pivot posed an added challenge: it envisioned first-year students working together in a start-up-inspired lab space, programming robots and designing systems and products. After lockdown, “all that had to be thrown out the window,” says Ishwar Puri, engineering dean at the time. In short, the engineering college had to execute two pivots simultaneously.
Fortunately, McMaster’s engineering school had a head start. Even before COVID-19, faculty members realized that if students missed a portion of the mega course due to issues such as illness or family emergency, then they would essentially miss the entire course. Accordingly, the school had already started work on virtualizing all aspects of teaching and learning, including lab projects. “When the pandemic hit, we put that effort on steroids,” says Puri, who is now vice president for research at the University of Southern California. Working with the education firm Quanser, the school developed an online platform that would employ peer-to-peer teaching methods and enable all 1,100 incoming students to work together on projects, such as finding locally sourced materials for wind turbines and programming drones for waste transport. Tools such as ANSYS-Granta EduPack and Autodesk Inventor let students collaborate on engineering designs from any location.
“Nothing was taken out of the curriculum,” Puri stresses. “All of the projects were virtualized so that they could be done remotely and there were no substitutions.” Intended learning outcomes were met. Recognizing that COVID-19 had probably intensified the uncertainty felt by incoming students, the school developed a virtual summer bridge course, Engineering Mentorship & Bridging Education Resources (EMBER), supplemented by tutorials, to give them a firmer grounding in math, physics, and chemistry. Each new arrival was also assigned a first-year mentor. The “overwhelming response” among first-year students “was that EMBER helped them prepare for university and alleviate anxiety about the upcoming academic year,” the instructors report.
Beyond Online Learning
McMaster offers a vivid example of how an engineering school was able to not just put instruction online during the pandemic but also use technology in a way that kept curriculum reforms, such as the Pivot, intact.
Certain pandemic-induced innovations—from expansive use of videos to online office hours to flipped classrooms—will likely become permanent fixtures at many engineering schools. Puri sees a future that more fully embraces digital technology, blurring the line between in-person and remote learning, incorporating technologies like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, virtual reality, and gamification. “I anticipate hybrid models that incorporate the virtual with the physical, because the virtual has proven itself more than worthy,” he says. This could include scenarios in which students mainly attend classes and labs in person, but receive some of their lessons online, as well as classes that are a mix of physical and remote learners. But he adds, “This will need visionary leadership to make it work, and at schools where that is lacking, it will die on the vine.”
At Rowan University, Sarah K. Bauer found that although engineering requires a lot of lab- and group-based learning, most students handled the transition to remote lessons adroitly. “It opens the door for more online and hybrid classes so there are more opportunities for other [non-campus-based] students to take them.” Changes will vary from institution to institution, says Bucknell University professor Alan Cheville. At his private university, the high teacher-to-student ratio is “our big selling point, so our president wants to get back to classroom teaching as soon as possible.” But other schools will see technologies providing a way to serve more students. “The inexorable trend is being smarter about what we can do best online and what we do best in person.”
Future Crises Expected
A larger lesson from McMaster’s experience is that engineering schools can adapt rapidly and well in a crisis. Cheville says future disruptions, ranging from new pandemics to volatile weather caused by climate change, could again wreak havoc on engineering schools. Because “a lot of universities were hit hard in the pocketbook” by this pandemic, he says, the most forward-thinking ones will be looking at new technologies so they’re ready to quickly deal with future disasters. Engineering academics at The Citadel and Wake Forest University argue in an ASEE 2021 Annual Conference paper that insights on how students dealt with this pandemic can help schools improve online teaching made necessary by future public health or extreme weather crises. They report that sophomores and juniors struggled the most with classroom workloads during last year’s shift from in-class to remote teaching.
At McMaster, meanwhile, “initial feedback from learners highlights a positive trend” in how the revamped first-year strategies were carried out, according to a conference paper by several materials science faculty members. Their own department tweaked the Pivot with virtual reality apps to show the kind of engineering equipment available at the university, its location, and how to operate it safely. In addition, virtual “science emulators,” such as a simulated control panel for an optical microscope, allowed students to explore different problem-solving options, as they would in an actual lab. But a final judgement on how students fared amid the pandemic is yet to come, they suggest: future surveys will compare the 2020–2021 first-year cohort’s experience over a longer period with that of students who were taught face-to-face in the traditional way.