Online robotics technology course design by balancing workload and affect

Abstract

This paper describes our course design approach that successfully transformed an undergraduate Robotics Technology course from in-person teaching to online guided by the TASKS model. Our course redesign process includes identifying conflicts, generating solutions, self-evaluation, and analyses of design solutions. We carefully balanced between Workload and students’ Affect, by designing comparable workloads as before, as well as maintaining students’ motivation similarly at the in-person level. Transforming this course consisting of lecture sessions and lab sessions with hardware and software elements yielded a set of course activities and teaching practices applicable to online teaching of other courses. When physical robots become unavailable, simulation projects were designed as alternatives and simulated versions of those physical projects used in face-to-face classroom. These simulation projects are in the areas of autonomous mobile robots, robotic manipulator, and advanced robotic control on MATLAB-ROS, respectively. Comparisons with past in-person results confirm that effective learning has been achieved remotely, having maintained student’s performance and motivation.