Abstract
Hands-on lab experiences are essential for enabling students to be successful engineers, especially those who identify as kinesthetic learners. This case study describes how a Mechanical Engineering Practice course sequence was redesigned during the COVID-19 emergency transition to remote learning and examines how students responded to these changes. The remote course included videos of Graduate Teaching Assistants conducting data acquisition phases of the practice session to replace hands-on experiments. To understand student perspectives and performance, researchers reviewed approximately 400 reflective essays from Spring 2020, and compared assignment submissions between Fall 2019 and Spring 2020. Results suggest that some students perceived the loss of hands-on activities as detrimental to their learning and it was not comparable to face-to-face counterparts. Furthermore, students felt forced to develop self-directed learning skills. However, in contrast to student comments in reflective essays, comparisons of assignment submissions suggested that students in Spring 2020 did not receive lower grades or have a reduced demonstration of conceptual knowledge obtained in the course.
Highlights
Hands-on lab experiences are essential for enabling students to be successful engineers, especially those who identify as kinesthetic learners
This case study focuses on four practice-based courses entitled Mechanical Engineering Practice (MEP) 1 - 4
The rapid transition to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic was a large, unprecedented, and unexpected challenge. This was difficult for the hands-on classes as part of the MEP sequence, lending to extreme measures to deliver these courses online
Summary
Hands-on lab experiences are essential for enabling students to be successful engineers, especially those who identify as kinesthetic learners. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 forced universities to transition their content delivery from F2F to virtual in a matter of days Though challenging, this situation provides opportunities to learn new strategies for delivering courses (Crawford et al, 2020; Manthalkar et al, 2020). Taken by students during their second and third years, the enrollment in these required courses ranges between 60 and 200 students per course, depending on the semester The premise of these courses is to provide students practical exposure to mechanical engineering content via hands-on projects to develop and improve their critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and application skills while solidifying their foundational academic knowledge and developing a more intuitive understanding of the material (Barr, 2017; Miller et al, 2014; van Susante et al, 2016). Two-credit, second-year MEEM students, hardware-based, topics include tension and bending tests, reverse engineering, data acquisition, MATLAB, elevator model and experiment, truss bridge modeling and experiment, manufacturing
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