Towards Simulation Aided Online Teaching: Material Design for Applied Fluid Mechanics

Learning is shifting from synchronous in-class settings to asynchronous online platforms in an attempt to make education accessible to wider audience. However, certain vital components of engineering education, such as laboratory work and hands-on practices, are harder to conduct online. Understanding how technology can help offering such components online can impact the quality of online education a great deal. The goal of this study is to improve the effectiveness of online courses in engineering. Particularly, we aim to transform some of the hands-on practices that are fundamental for engineering education into online setting. We first explored existing literature and found that real-time experimentation can be carried out with the help of online modules. We then designed two simulations for a fluid mechanics lab. We expect these simulations to be used to support teaching and evaluation of fluid mechanics through various assignments that utilize these simulations.  This study surveys how online modules have been studied in effort to relax the time and location constraints of in-class education. Drawing upon the literature review it proposes a novel approach to incorporate simulations to ground learning of abstract concepts such as buoyancy.