Engaging students in COVID times with immersive learning and Self-driven Challenge Based Learning

The impact of mobility restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic in the year 2020 altered all the planned activities of the MSc Energy for Smart Cities in four European locations (Stockholm, Leuven, Grenoble and Barcelona) with a majority of non-European students. In addition, the master programme has specific activities where students join together in three European cities (Barcelona, Antwerp and Amsterdam). The response was to immediately introduce online tools with two relevant pedagogical innovations. The first one, Immersive Learning, addressed to overcome as much as possible the experience of living in the cities that couldn’t be visited. The solution implemented has been designed to be simple and low cost in order to ensure the maximum reasonable value. The second innovation has been to take advantage of the pandemic obstacles to evolve the Challenge Based Learning towards a new methodology were students actively assume the role of defining the challenges, aligned with their interests and motivations, keeping the connection with the companies and institutions involved in the innovation and startup ecosystem. The positive effect of those innovations has been to increase the engagement and motivation of students despite the difficult situation.