2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Paper Type: We are proposing our past work on undergraduate engineering outcomes in an online lab-based measurement & instrumentation course as a Research paper at the 2024 ASEE Annual Conference.

Motivation and Background: Since the rise of online education, researchers in engineering education have been studying the virtual delivery of coursework, especially for job training or re-training topics like programming and mechatronics. Yet gaps in online course delivery and understanding remain, especially for lab classes that require hands-on experiential learning with real hardware. This type of instruction is critical for student comprehension and skill transference, but to date there is limited consensus on how best to deliver this experiential course content, especially in online education contexts. Our research centered on studying student experiences and learning outcomes across different levels of synchronous delivery of an online lab class (relative to an in-person class in the same student body) to help answer questions about how to administer hardware-based lab learning online and how much synchronous engagement is enough in these cases.

Methods: This project considered student experiences and learning outcomes in an upperclassmen-level lab-based measurement and instrumentation class at a large public university, which uses a “lab kit-in-a-box” model. We collected data from versions of the course that varied instruction synchronicity, spanning the following scenarios: asynchronous, synchronous, and in-person. Asynchronous offerings involved no synchronous interactions with the teaching team, aside from almost fully unused interaction with teaching team members during office hours (held via Zoom). Synchronous offerings involved fully synchronous labs (held via the gather.town platform) and office hours (held via Zoom).

Results: We collected data from approximately 200 consenting undergraduate mechanical engineering students in each of the synchronicity options (N > 600) and analyzed the data from varying levels of course synchronicity using statistical tests. This assessment compared student experiences and learning outcomes across all three variations of the studied class: asynchronous, synchronous, and in-person. Key results included the insight that certain lab experiences (e.g., early labs with high levels of early skill-building for the class) went best in the synchronous online iterations, while later labs with deeper dives into specific skills were experienced similarly between the synchronous online and in-person delivery conditions. Importantly, synchronous online delivery was often indistinguishable in end result from in-person delivery, which is encouraging news.

Implications: This work helps to answer important open questions about how to deliver hands-on experiential training to engineering students in online learning settings. Outcomes from the work can help to lay the groundwork for broader and theoretical investigation into pedagogical question on hardware-based Ecampus lab work, as well as synchronicity in online learning, while also addressing the pressing need for access to high-quality engineering training for all learners. The results of this investigation can benefit engineering educators, as well as those with interest in online physical labs in other disciplines.

Keywords: Online Education, Laboratory Learning, Student Experience