Rapid transition of traditionally hands-on labs to online instruction in engineering courses

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic forced universities to suspend face-to-face instruction, prompting a rapid transition to online education. As many lab courses transitioned online, this provided a rare window of opportunity to learn about the challenges and affordances that the online lab experiences created for students and instructors. We present results from exploratory educational research that investigated student motivation and self-regulated learning in the online lab environment. We consider two student factors: motivation and self-regulation. The instrument is administered to students (n = 121) at the beginning of the semester and statistically analysed for comparisons between different demographic groups. The results indicated students' major was the only distinguishing factor for their motivation and self-regulation. Students' unfamiliarity with online labs or uncertainty about what to expect in the course contributed to the lower levels of self-regulation. The lack of significant differences between various subgroups was not surprising, as we posit many students entered the virtual lab environment with the same level of online lab experience. We conducted interviews among these respondents to explore the factors in greater detail. Using latent Dirichlet allocation, three main topics that emerged: (1) Learning Compatibility, (2) Questions and Inquiry, and (3) Planning and Coordination.