Abstract:

Due to the pandemic in early 2020, the French government, like many others, has decided to temporarily close the universities and has asked faculty to devote themselves entirely to online teaching. While the availability of online tools is useful for students temporarily away from their university or in countries with less educational opportunities, the limitations of such tools need to be analyzed in depth. Online access to scientific publications, presentations or videos are interesting supports and useful add-ons to training, especially in the field of microelectronics engineering. Completely changing the educational paradigm from face-to-face to fully online education is another matter and clearly leads to severe disappointments and disastrous results on the acquisition of know-how, a requirement in microelectronics field.

Indeed, since March 2020, the vast majority of theoretical courses, tutorials and even practical labworks have been remotely organized using videoconferencing. In this context, several points relating to high-level courses (masters and engineers) have been observed:
- Being 8 hours per day in front of a computer screen with almost no time-out, isolated at home or in a small flat, is not ideal to keep the attention and worst, favors a quick focus lost.
- The students do not (or very marginally) interact with the teacher as they do not feel his presence. Moreover, online asking questions is more difficult because most of the interactions with the teacher are lost, especially the gesture and body language.
- Understanding methodologies and scientific approaches require stimulating the students while remote learning favors their passivity.
- During the training sessions, most of the students are waiting for the solution instead of searching it by themselves. This implies at the end a reduced autonomy and a lack of questions, which are however for the group dynamic.
- Teachers are spending a lot more time preparing because everything they try to do should be written down as much as possible. This tends to lower the comments, which are useful for helping the understanding. In face-to-face situations, the teachers naturally limit the pre-written documents and displayed slides. This favors the curiosity and the discussions, for instance by giving analogies that are really useful in engineering or physics.
- In circuit design, labworks can be done online thanks to an important preparatory work for giving access to a large number of students while maintaining the network security.
- The excessive use of Internet on undersized networks leads to frequent communication breakdowns causing a loss of time. Increasing the capacity of the servers and connections will solve the problem at the price of higher power consumption, which is not neutral for the carbon footprint.
- The permanent exchanges done in the practice room by the students with their classmates and teachers make their progression ten times faster than in a remote fashion.
- After the resumption of a few face-to-face sessions in the field of design in early 2021, a survey showed that 90% of the students confirm the low effectiveness of online training and declare realizing the benefits of physical labworks.

These different points will be addressed and detailed showing the limits of a fully online approach, which leads to a strong degradation of the skills and know-how of graduate students in microelectronics engineering.

Keywords:

Remote learning, face-to-face, microelectronics education, skills and know-how, limits of a fully online approach.