Prompting by COVID-19 to Rethink the Purpose of Engineering Laboratory Education -- Develop Practical Competence to Solve Real-World Problems

Today's engineering laboratory education often lacks opportunities for students to practice critical thinking through real-world problems. This particular objective is even harder to achieve through online laboratory experiments. In this article, we summarize our innovation in using a real-worl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdvances in engineering education Vol. 8; no. 4
Main Authors Leung, Siu Ling, Hargrove, Brianne A, Marsh, Eric R, Gregg, Andrea R, Thole, Karen A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published American Society for Engineering Education 01.12.2020
Subjects
Computer Assisted Instruction
COVID-19
Critical Thinking
Data Analysis
Distance Education
Educational Change
Electronic Learning
Engineering Education
Laboratory Experiments
Laboratory Training
Online Courses
Pandemics
Problem Based Learning
Problem Solving
Role of Education
Undergraduate Students
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1941-1766
1941-1766

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Summary:Today's engineering laboratory education often lacks opportunities for students to practice critical thinking through real-world problems. This particular objective is even harder to achieve through online laboratory experiments. In this article, we summarize our innovation in using a real-world challenge, analyze big data, to empower student data analysis skills in remote teaching platform. This approach allows students to collect data, analyze, and evaluate possible solutions continuously through hands-on experimentation with accessible resources around them. Compared to the video-recorded lab, our method achieves a higher level of learning in Bloom's taxonomy. To further improve our approach, we summarize our lesson learned from transferring six different engineering laboratory courses online, in response to the COVID-19. A thriving 21st-century learning environment has to embrace agility, create flexibility, adapt to technology, and support virtual team collaborations.
ISSN:1941-1766
1941-1766