Students’ Evaluation Toward Online Teaching Strategies for Engineering Courses during COVID

Abstract

Extended Abstract As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, courses at various educational institutions were suddenly migrated online in the Spring 2020 semester. For many of the instructors, this was their first experience teaching engineering courses virtually. Instructors applied a range of online teaching strategies to assist students in learning better. The purpose of this study was to gather student feedback on different teaching methods and uncover whether or not these approaches were used or were found to be supportive by the students. Our findings can benefit instructors of engineering courses in improving or changing their teaching methods in order to enable students to adjust to remote learning better. The research team administered surveys during the final two weeks in the semester of Spring 2020. One hundred nineteen participants answered a series of closed questions related to the instructors’ teaching strategies across 8 different engineering courses (Table 1). Specifically, based on the question “ What things did your instructor do that was helpful for learning online ,” participants assessed whether instructors’ teaching strategies were helpful or not. The criteria for evaluation were Not Helpful, Slightly Helpful, Somewhat Helpful, Helpful, Very Helpful, and N/A . N/A means the instructor did not use this strategy. Our findings suggested that teaching strategies made students feel supported and indicated that discussion forums, flexible deadlines, and clear expectations were among the helpful. Fan Yu is a doctoral of Information Science and Learning Technologies Fan received her MS in Elementary Education Science and a graduate certificate in Curriculum and Instructions. Fan’s research interests include STEM education and UX design in learning technologies. She concerns about how learning technologies encourage students from underrepresented groups to study and work in STEM fields.