Preparing undergraduates for the post-pandemic workplace: Teams of education and engineering students teach engineering virtually

Abstract

When schools and universities across the world transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed+gineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that partners engineering and education undergraduates to design and deliver engineering lessons to elementary students, also had to shift its hands-on lessons to a virtual format. Through the lens of social cognitive theory (SCT), this study investigates engineering and education students’ experiences during the shift to online instruction to understand how they perceived its influence on their learning. As a result of modifying their lessons for online delivery, students reported learning professional skills, including skills for teaching online and educational technology skills, as well as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content. Some also lamented missed learning opportunities, like practice presenting face-to-face. Students’ affective responses were often associated with preparing and delivering their lessons. SCT sheds light on how the mid-semester change in their environment, caused by the shift in designing and teaching from face-to-face to online, affected the undergraduate engineering and education students’ personal experiences and affect. Overall, the transition to fully online was effective for students’ perceived learning and teaching of engineering. Though students experienced many challenges developing multimedia content for delivering hands-on lessons online, they reported learning new skills and knowledge and expressed positive affective responses. From the gains reported by undergraduates, we believe that this cross-disciplinary virtual team assignment was a successful strategy for helping undergraduates build competencies in virtual skills. We posit that similar assignment structures and opportunities post-pandemic will also continue to prepare future students for the post-pandemic workplace.