Student and Instructor Responses to Remote Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

is the McDonnell Family Bridge Professor holding a joint appointment in Chemical and Biological Engineering and Education at Tufts University. He received his BS and MS degrees from UC San Diego and his PhD from UC Berkeley, all in chemical engineering. He is interested in integrating technology into effective educational practices and in promoting the use of higher-level cognitive and social skills in engineering problem solving. LITERATURE REVIEWI reviewed published articles in three COVID-related special issues for archival journals relevant to chemical engineering education: Advances in Engineering Education, [5] Biomedical Engineering Education, [6] and the Journal of Chemical Education. [7] At the time this paper was written, special issues for Chemical Engineering Education and the Journal of Engineering Education had not yet been published. These 255 special issue papers address a broad span of topics including course design, content delivery, assessment practices, classroom environment, and project and laboratory work. Of the papers reviewed, eleven report directly on

Bridging the Gap: Computer Simulations and Video Recordings for Remote Inquiry-Based Laboratory Activities in Mechanics

“…Such differences could be due to the different characteristics of each task or due to the time in the term the task was delivered. Some motivational differences may be attributed to more general student frustrations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the less engaging experience yielded by instantaneous shifts to remote university courses (Koretsky 2022). On the other hand, researchers have argued that there is an inherently motivating aspect when students work with their hands performing real physical experiments (de Jong, Linn, and Zacharia 2013; Rau 2020).…”

Progression from the mean: Cultivating instructors' unique trajectories of practice using educational technology

“…Quickly following this declaration, in‐person instruction ceased in most universities, leaving instructors to scramble with how to teach their classes remotely, often with only about 1 week to make the transition (London et al, 2022). The pandemic provided many unforeseen challenges to instructors, including how to attend to students' reduced motivation and engagement and high stress (Casper et al, 2022; Koretsky, 2022). Institutional context played a role in the ways that instructors and students responded to the pandemic as well.…”

“…The sudden shift to remote instruction prompted instructor decision‐making processes and shifts in practice (Koretsky, 2022; Manierre et al, 2022), which simultaneously were influenced by their trajectory of practice and influenced that trajectory as well. The responses could range, for example, from instructors trying to replicate their in‐person instruction as closely as possible in the remote setting to considering the learning objectives and the social toll of the pandemic, identifying the affordances and constraints of online learning, and redesigning course learning activities and assessments to appropriately respond as well as possible.…”

Video-Inspired, Student-Written Problems vs Textbook Problems: Comparing Difficulty and Problem-Solving Skills between Two Cohorts in Chemical Engineering

“…In contrast to remote and hybrid teaching modalities delivered starting in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both cohorts had a similar in-person modality, and thus, similar results may be expected. 36 Similarities in perceived problem difficulty across cohorts and problem types implies that students were not exposed to additional stresses or workloads by solving VISW problems. Therefore, VISW problems were similar to expert-written Textbook problems when assigned as homework as part of a traditional, in-person engineering course.…”