Background and Scope
The CoViD19 pandemic has affected all aspects of daily life including university education. While many lectures and seminars transitioned more or less smoothly to online versions around the globe, there is anecdotic evidence that this has happened to a much smaller extent for lab courses, i.e., that a substantial number of labs got cancelled, postponed, or replaced by other courses as an emergency measure.
Nonetheless, there is amble work to investigate online teaching elements in the context of lab courses. But the investigated methods and implementations are typically far from being sufficient to allow Project Based Learning, which has a strong tradition in engineering education and for which a substantial amount of evidence for its benefits exists. This discrepancy may also be a factor why the physical presence of students in labs still seems to be considered to be an absolute necessity in parts of the engineering education community.
In this project, a set-up was set-up as a proof-of-concept that Project Based Learning can be conducted in an online fashion in engineering education. While being based on marine robotics, it includes general aspects of the engineering curriculum with respect to highly relevant topics in modern high-impact technologies like robotics, automation, and AI. In doing so, the project built upon the project Applied Education in the Digitalization Age (Hands-On 4.0).
Publications
There are several publications related to the project:
[1] A. Birk and D. Simunovic, “Robotics Labs and Other Hands-On Teaching During COVID-19: Change Is Here to Stay?,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), vol. 28, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2021.3102979 [Open Access]
[2] A. Birk, E. Dineva, F. Maurelli, and A. Nabor, “A Robotics Course during CoViD-19: Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Online Teaching beyond the Pandemic,” Robotics, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010005 [Open Access]
[3] F. Maurelli, E. Dineva, A. Nabor, and A. Birk, “Robotics and Intelligent Systems: a new curriculum development and adaptations needed in Coronavirus times,” in Robotics in Education (RiE), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2021, pp. 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82544-7_9
[4] A. Birk and E. Dineva, “Improved Students’ Performance in an Online Robotics Class During COVID-19: Do only Strong Students Profit?,” in Robotics in Education (RiE), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2021, pp. 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82544-7_13 [Preprint PDF]
Acknowledgements
The project was financed by the Jacobs Foundation within the B3 – Bildung Beyond Boundaries framework.