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The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a public health emergency of international concern. The spread of the virus all over the world sent billions of people into lockdown. In light of rising concerns, a growing number of universities across the globe and specifically in the United States have either postponed or canceled all campus events such as workshops, conferences, sports, and other activities. Universities took intensive measures to prevent and protect all students, faculty, and staff members from the highly infectious disease. This resulted in migrating all face-to-face courses into an online course. In this paper, the authors present the impact of COVID-19 on migrating a Team-based Learning C programming course from face-to-face to online delivery and its effect on student learning. The results section of this paper shows that the student learning curve was affected significantly by the sudden online delivery of the course.

Today's competitive global market demands that engineers possess "soft skills" in addition to technical skills. Currently, engineers learn leadership, teamwork, and management skills while working "soft skills the hard way". In order to meet the demands of this changing world, engineering programs in different universities are challenged to come up with innovative ways to teach classes so that graduates are prepared to take on the challenges twenty-first-century engineers face. Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an advancing teaching pedagogy that shifts instruction from a traditional lecture-based teaching paradigm to a structured learning sequence. TBL has shown to be effective in student academic success and retention; however, it may also aid in the development of soft skills required for the industry. This study focuses on 165 students who were enrolled in a freshman-level programming course in the Fall 2019. The students were all asked voluntarily to fill a "Soft Skills Survey" in the second week of the semester that consisted of 38 questions evaluating various categories of soft skills. At the end of the semester, the same survey was given and both were used to evaluate the effectiveness of TBL on students' soft skills. The conducted survey is designed to assess five overarching factors within the TBL framework: The first is how group work improves individual motivation; the second is how group work stimulates academic growth; the third is the individual student's creative and critical thinking skills; the fourth is the value of group work for their overall education; the last is confidence in their own academic skills. Traditionally, the effectiveness of TBL has been assessed through grades and numeric measures of performance; however, TBL was designed to both enhance learning as well as team collaboration and critical thinking skills. These two surveys were conducted to assess the "soft skills" outcome gains. Preliminary results for this study showed modest gains in critical thinking and external motivation. The results show that using TBL will organically enhance the students' soft skills.

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Team-Based Learning (TBL) is an evidence-based collaborative learning teaching strategy designed around units of instruction, known as "modules" that are taught in a three-step cycle: preparation, inclass readiness assurance test (RAT), and application-focused exercise. The in-class RAT includes two subtests; individual RAT (iRAT) and team RAT (tRAT). In first-year programming classes, the instructors rely on the mini-lecture to deliver advanced concepts or present a programming exercise to the students. Meanwhile, most of the class time is consumed by the iRAT, tRAT, and application-focused exercise. This paper sheds light on an attempt to modify the conventional TBL approach by taking the iRAT outside the classroom and exploit its time to extend the mini-lecture time. This modification is achieved by the aid of an interactive online book, which ensures that the students finished their reading assignments before the class. Hence, the interactive book can allow us to take the iRAT outside the classroom, which will save at least 20% of the class time. The proposed approach was implemented to a class of 165 students in Fall 2019 and 47 students in Spring 2020, and the preliminary results show that the students finish each class reading assignment with an average percentage of 87%.