Hands-on Education Without the Hands-On? An Approach to Online Delivery of a Senior Lab Course in Chemical Engineering While Maintaining Key Learning Outcomes

Abstract

The senior chemical engineering lab course at UBC follows an open-ended problem-based lab (PBL) framework, which has been shown in previous work to improve self-reported learning outcomes in students. Given the hands-on experiential components of lab-based courses in general, their shift to remote delivery, such as the one required by the COVID-19 pandemic, is challenging. Shifting a PBL course to a virtual setting while maintaining its more open-ended learning outcomes is likely even more difficult. This paper outlines the design of an online senior PBL course in chemical and biological engineering, in which TAs, present in the lab, act as Operators and implement student-designed experimental plans over several weeks, while maintaining active virtual contact with their teams. Feedback from students on this experience, the particulars of the course design, and the perceived value of this approach, based on data collected from survey responses, is presented and compared to similar data collected for the latest in-person offering of the same course.

Double Trouble: Student perspectives on the transition from online prescribed labs, to in-person and open-ended problem-based labs

“…Although it is always difficult to conclusively compare results from different cohorts, the apparent consistency of responses to these questions does give some measure of confidence in the results obtained and presented in this paper. The results reported in previous work on the PBL course design [3,4] also reflects the themes raised by the respondents in the current study, further providing confidence in the validity of the responses.…”

“…Synchronous contact was maintained between student teams and operators during lab sessions. A full account of the course design is available in other work [3,4].…”

“…In 4 th year, the labs are open-ended and the year-long course follows a problem-based lab (PBL) approach, in which students are given little in the way of specific instructions or direction, and are instead responsible for the development and implementation of their own unique multi-week experimental plans to address an assigned problem statement. The design and measured impact of this PBL course, which focuses on the development of higherorder transferrable engineering skills like critical thinking, open-ended data analysis, decision-making, problemsolving and troubleshooting, and technical communication, are extensively described in previous work [2][3][4][5]. This work also highlights some challenges that students identified related to the abrupt transition from the prescribed labs in 2 nd and 3 rd year to open-ended problembased ones in their final year.…”

“…Labs in 2 nd and 3 rd years took the form of prescribed worksheets to complete based on prerecorded experiments and provided data sheets of simulated results. 4 th year labs maintained an active PBL format using a course design using TAs as operator proxies for the students, in an approach that was described and evaluated in previous work [4].…”

Implementation of E-Learning in Public and Private Schools: Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Meanwhile, due to other factors, online courses have faced some difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, due to the change in the delivery of the course materials, students might not be able to carry out hands-on activities as expected (Ghaemi & Potvin, 2021). Many studies have focused on college students' online learning.…”