<p>First-year design courses are a vital part of engineering education, as they increase self-efficacy, boost motivation, and strengthen engineering identities through hands-on, project-based learning. However, these courses were significantly disrupted during the rapid shift to virtual learning due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The course structure changed significantly to adapt to a virtual format, and stay-at-home orders meant students were unable to access resources on campus. This work aims at investigating the effect of the rapid transition to virtual learning on the experiences and learning outcomes of students enrolled in a first-year engineering design course using survey&nbsp;data, scraped data from&nbsp;the&nbsp;university learning management system (Canvas), and subsequent in-depth semi-structured interviews. This poster presents the quantitative analysis of the survey data and&nbsp;scraped data from Canvas, and preliminary qualitative results of students' responses to open-ended questions querying their experiences during and after the rapid transition to virtual learning. The final results of this work would allow educators to design future curricula based on the identified effects of the transition, provide insight into the positive elements of virtual learning that may be transferred to in-person learning environments, as well as build on prior work on the effectiveness and design of virtual learning environments.</p>

Going Digital: Evaluating the Effect of the Rapid Transition to Virtual Learning Due to Covid-19 on Student Experiences in an Engineering Design Course

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.