Exploring Teaching and Learning Experience during COVID-19 Pandemic in Engineering Education

Abstract

The education system is continuously modernizing by accommodating the need due to the industrial revolution. Various teaching modes are also introduced including a diverse range of students, particularly in engineering education. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted normal education worldwide, forced to shut down campus activity for an extended period which forced Universities to adopt alternative approaches to continue student’s academic year. Engineering education faced significant challenges to find a realistic substitution for lab-based hands-on activity as well as group or team-based learning experiences. It is therefore very important to know the challenges and ways to address them. This paper evaluates the teaching and learning experiences observed in engineering education in Australia and abroad during the COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID period. The key motivation of this study is to identify key challenges arises due to COVID-19, develop Teaching & Learning (T & L) approaches to address these challenges and evaluate the effectiveness of the applied changes in the T & L approach, identify shortcomings, and find ways to improve them. The student feedback on selected engineering units have been collected from Deakin and Murdoch university in Australia to evaluate the performances of the applied changes. This data is considered as an authentic source of information to compare and identify the key challenges and effectiveness for students’ learning in pre-COVID and during COVID condition. This study later explored various literatures to gather experiences from other universities across the globe and by analysing all findings including academic experiences finally developed constructive recommendations for improvement. It is found that the current form of online mode of teaching has room to improve further as one segment of students finds it challenging and some others like a few approaches. It is also found that the online infrastructure, staff skills to innovate new unit designs, and motivating students are the other challenging areas. Therefore, a new teaching and learning framework is required to overcome all the challenges for future learning.