The COVID-19 pandemic forced college education to shift from face-to-face to online instruction. This effort is particularly challenging for freshmen and sophomore students, in engineering design projects where collaboration is needed. The study aims to qualitatively understand challenges and possible strategies in remote design collaboration through the lens of an undergraduate-level engineering design introduction class. The authors closely observed team members’ struggles and how they handled them through bi-weekly and final reflections in a semester-long project. The reflection data at the end of the semester showed that the most commonly mentioned challenges were about team collaboration and understanding of the design processes and methodologies. Remote learning was not explicitly revealed as a top challenge; however, it might have exaggerated other challenges implicitly. When looking at the bi-weekly data against the timeline, we found that remote and personal situations were the top two challenges almost in all weeks, however, they both dropped significantly after the first four weeks. On the other hand, the frequency of challenges mentioned about team collaboration and understanding of design-related learning content in a two-week period was more related to the amount of work and difficulty level of the design work in that period. The strategies identified were centered around the two categories: team collaboration and design. Better team planning and following design processes are the top two suggested strategies for team collaboration, while iterating the design and brainstorming ideas earlier and more extensively are the top two for better design. The findings provide insights to experimentations that aim to establish a successful remote learning environment that reaches core education objectives of engineering design while also helping students adapt to a geographically distributed engineering workforce in future. The study also illustrated the usefulness of reflections as a tool to capture students’ learning dynamics.
Authors: Caroline Bartels and Elise Belanger
Faculty Advisor: Jinjuan She, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
You must be logged in to post a comment.