Abstract:

During the pandemic, most of the educators that were used to traditional in-person teaching were impelled to explore new methods to continue their courses’ instruction virtually in short or even in no time notice. This challenge required learning the proper on-line delivery, innovating, improvising, exploring, and conquering panic at the same time. Conventional in-person instruction is the standard delivery of all engineering courses and laboratories in the department of engineering at the University of Tennessee at Martin. This paper shares “another” experience on how this shift of instructional delivery was an eye opener to a world of resources and an admirable use of new tools to continue using even after the pandemic is lifted. The courses presented in this paper are all civil-engineering courses that had to be delivered virtually to the students including their assigned laboratories. Canvas-a web-based learning management system was used as the main platform to access and manage the online courses. Zoom was another video platform to deliver and communicate both synchronous and asynchronous learning. A summary with examples on how the recording and delivery of lectures, assignments and exercises, virtual laboratory, testing, and grading were performed will be presented in this paper. Students’ feedback and evaluation of this online and hybrid experience is also shared in both standardized students’ evaluation forms as well as narratives from others.

Keywords:

Education, engineering, Online, pandemic.