Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

DOI

10.1057/s41599-023-02383-6

Publication Title

Humanities & Social Sciences Communications

Volume

10

Issue

1

Pages

849 (1-18)

Abstract

When schools and universities across the world transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed+gineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that partners engineering and education undergraduates to design and deliver engineering lessons to elementary students, also had to shift its hands-on lessons to a virtual format. Through the lens of social cognitive theory (SCT), this study investigates engineering and education students’ experiences during the shift to online instruction to understand how they perceived its influence on their learning. As a result of modifying their lessons for online delivery, students reported learning professional skills, including skills for teaching online and educational technology skills, as well as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content. Some also lamented missed learning opportunities, like practice presenting face-to-face. Students’ affective responses were often associated with preparing and delivering their lessons. SCT sheds light on how the mid-semester change in their environment, caused by the shift in designing and teaching from face-to-face to online, affected the undergraduate engineering and education students’ personal experiences and affect. Overall, the transition to fully online was effective for students’ perceived learning and teaching of engineering. Though students experienced many challenges developing multimedia content for delivering hands-on lessons online, they reported learning new skills and knowledge and expressed positive affective responses. From the gains reported by undergraduates, we believe that this cross-disciplinary virtual team assignment was a successful strategy for helping undergraduates build competencies in virtual skills. We posit that similar assignment structures and opportunities post-pandemic will also continue to prepare future students for the post-pandemic workplace.

Rights

© 2023 The Author(s).

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not available from the authors due to data security measures promised in our participant consent forms approved by the Old Dominion University Institutional Review Board (IRB) #1249767-15 and #1451315-20."

ORCID

0000-0002-9339-7574 (Gutierrez), 0000-0003-4348-7798 (Pazos), 0000-0002-8095-938X (Kaipa), 0000-0003-0604-8606 (Ayala)

Original Publication Citation

Gutierrez, K. S., Kidd, J. J., Lee, M. J., Pazos, P., Kaipa, K., & Ayala, O. (2023). Preparing undergraduates for the post-pandemic workplace: Teams of education and engineering students teach engineering virtually. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-18, Article 849. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02383-6

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