Abstract
The article describes observations from the online teaching of a robotics class during the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, also known as the coronavirus. The changes in the course structure and in the provided material lead to an unexpected increase in the grade performance of the students. The article provides a description and an analysis of the effects and their possible causes. In addition to a grade-performance analysis, further data from a university-wide and from a course-specific survey are used. The analysis of the effects and their possible causes is furthermore discussed in relation to the educational research literature. Some evidence for the general findings is provided, which are of interest for online teaching or blended learning in general, respectively, for teaching in robotics and related areas. These include some evidence for the benefits of asynchronous online teaching and for the role of social interaction, which may happen in self-organized, smaller peer groups, even without the intervention of the instructor. The findings and the extensive pointers to the literature can also provide useful guidelines for instructors of robotics courses when considering the use of online or blended teaching in the future beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 [1]
A one-way Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) of grades by year showed a significant main effect for the exam year, namely F(3, 117) = 10.21, p < 0.001, i.e., there is a pronounced F-value for the critical value p < 0.001, a − 1 = 3 effect degrees of freedom, and N − a = 117 error degrees of freedom
Students achieved a better grade performance compared to previous years, and there were indicators for high approval rates for the way the course was taught
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 [1]. The article presents possible explanations for this observation including data and discussions with reference to the educational literature. It provides some guidelines for possible positive elements that can be taken into account for online education in robotics and related disciplines. The article makes the following two main contributions It provides indications in the spirit of evidence-based education [9,10] using proper data analyses, which can be further used in, e.g., meta-studies to identify general trends.
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