Abstract:

The International Association of Universities (IAU) report that more than 1.5 billion students and youth across the planet are affected by school and university closures due to the COVID-19 outbreak. A complimentary European University Association (EUA) survey on “Digitally enhanced learning & teaching” affirms that 95% of institutions pivoted to distance learning during the pandemic. This shift may have worked well for theoretical classroom delivery. For example, students are reporting that they particularly appreciate the opportunity to revisit lectures that is now commonly afforded through recorded lectures. However, many engineering and science programmes rely heavily on laboratory experiences which provide students with opportunities to explore and implement the theory and to develop key professional skills related to designing, implementing, testing and evaluating experiments and projects. Finding complementary ways to enable these practical tasks has been less successful during COVID-19, despite the recognised importance of practice activities for STEM subjects.

Like many engineering faculties, our response during the first wave (March 2020 – May 2020) was to replace all practical laboratories with simulated laboratories. This choice was driven by the emergency nature of the pandemic, which provided little time to plan any feasible alternative. Recognising that COVID-19 might persist and recognising the limitations of an exclusively virtual experience, staff within our Department explored the potential of “take-home” equipment. Consequently, a low-cost, portable solution was designed, developed and manufactured. This solution enabled many of the first and second year laboratory experiments/experiences within our Electronic Engineering programme to be completed at home. Consequently, in October 2020, as Ireland entered its second lock-down, many of our physical laboratories were substituted by practical activities completed at home on this platform.

During the period September 2020 to May 2021, our second-year students will have experienced traditional laboratories, simulated laboratories and now take-home laboratories. This provides a unique opportunity to explore that experience of these various modes of delivery.

The contribution of this article is two-fold. Firstly we report on the functionality of the low-cost platform that we designed so that interested third-parties can replicate the solution. Secondly, this paper reports on the experience of an engineering cohort who have encountered three different approaches to delivering practical learning.

The timing and a brief description of the approaches are:
1. Pre-COVID - Traditional laboratory delivery on campus.
2. COVID emergency response - All practical work is completed exclusively using simulation-based tools.
3. COVID long-term response - Students are given sufficient equipment and support infrastructure to safely conduct experimental work at home.

The paper will present details of the teaching and infrastructure requirements associated with each approach. The student experience is explored through in-depth group interviews with students that have experienced all three modes of delivery. These are recorded and transcribed. The main themes, experiences and impacts of the three different modes are identified through a careful content-analysis of the resulting transcriptions. Our paper details this comparative review and the impact on student learning.

Keywords:

Engineering, Laboratory at home, COVID, Learning Impact.