Studying the COVID-19 impacts on engineering education

Studying the COVID-19 impacts on engineering education

CONTEXT
Throughout the world, the emergence and spread of the COVID-19 epidemic has led to a massive change in the delivery of education. The role of educational providers is to enable the learners to acquire the necessary global competencies and to nurture the skill of developing services that meet the utmost needs of the society by tuning them effectively. Many universities around the world have changed traditional undergraduate classrooms into virtual online learning and blended learning classrooms to cope with these challenges brought by this pandemic. There are more than 100 students studying water engineering courses at the University of Southern Queensland, and at least 70 percent of them attend courses off-campus. As the University has a high number of remote students, there were already established online learning environments before the pandemic. Examiners used a variety of digital learning resources that were flexible by adopting new learning approaches.

PURPOSE OR GOAL
This paper explores how a variety of online learning resources were used to facilitate student engagement prior to and during COVID-19 for Hydraulics II (ENV3104) students. It includes designing and implementing activities within the course, considering learning styles, engineering skills, transversal competencies, and higher-order thinking skills.

APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS
This will be achieved analysing reports and data: - on learning environment resources utilised by the examiner in ENV3104 before and during the pandemic for students e-learning tasks and - Analysis of survey results of student's engagement, evaluation and progression for ENV3104 before and during the pandemic

ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES
The study will illustrate various online learning resources and assessment techniques for the online delivery of engineering courses during global pandemics. These guidelines will provide a framework for quality teaching and evaluative practices in online engineering courses.

CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY
Students in ENV3104 have been more engaged in online learning during the pandemic than before. The progression of students was higher than pre-covid, and the overall satisfaction with the course was high.

Files associated with this item cannot be displayed due to copyright restrictions.