EAGER: Investigating the rapid transition from face-to-face to exclusively online engineering laboratory classes in an Electrical and Computer Engineering program

The COVID-19 global health crisis has forced educators to rapidly shift to online instruction methods. While this effort is already difficult for faculty, it is particularly challenging for instructors who have designed a portion of their curricula with hands-on laboratory instruction, as in the case for many STEM courses. To offer the effective education in-person instruction affords, it is important to maintain the same educational and curricular value of laboratories while taking advantage of benefits that online education and online experimentation tools offer. This project will transcend the demands of the COVID-19 crisis as it investigates the impact of using a full set of online laboratory modules in an engineering laboratory course. Impacts on faculty resistance to adoption, student motivation and self-regulation, and user experience and success are evaluated in this study. Online labs (remote and virtual) have long been considered promising options to enhance the student educational experience, but broad adoption has been limited. The current circumstances allow us to establish a successful use case by re-casting a semester-long, hands-on, experiential learning component into a fully online set of instructional labs. Nevertheless, rapidly deploying fully online experimentation and instruction in engineering challenges our dominant instructional model, especially in a traditional face-to-face institution in which both faculty and students may show resistance but also surprising adoption of online education technology. While associated with considerable challenges, establishing and empirically investigating such a successful use case offers high reward opportunities for knowledge generation, as well as benefits for faculty and students in engineering programs across the nation.

This project will leverage the development and deployment of online labs and integrated online instruction modules to investigate the impact of using an exclusively online instructional mode for a fundamental electrical and computer engineering laboratory course. To reach this goal, the project will answer the following three research questions: A) How do faculty experience a top-down mandated, time-constrained, and rapid transition to exclusively online-based laboratory modules in engineering courses along the continuum of resistance towards the wholesale embrace of educational technologies? B) How does exclusively online laboratory instruction and online experimentation impact students? learning experiences in terms of engagement, investigated through self-regulation and motivation? C) What user experience factors influence the success of introducing exclusively online experimentation activities into engineering courses and curricula? The research design will comprise three thrusts: faculty, student, and user experience perspective. All thrusts will employ a convergent, parallel, mixed-methods research approach using quantitative and qualitative measures. Informed by theoretical frameworks including the diffusion of innovation, the propagation paradigm, student cognitive and emotional engagement, and user-centered design, this project will develop in-depth knowledge on how online experimentation can be successfully deployed in engineering education settings. As a result, this project will a) lead to a framework for educational technology propagation, specific to online engineering labs and reflecting factors for both efficacies and fit, b) inform a model for student-centered online experimentation with explicit guidelines for student support, and c) inform a comprehensive model of success factors for designing user-centered online experimentation activities. The results of this research will also expand the reach and impact of engineering disciplines that have historically required face-to-face facilities to provide integral laboratory instruction. This project will enable online experimentation experiences that support core education learning objectives while also meeting the challenges of a diverse, mobile, and geographically distributed engineering workforce.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.