The pandemic of COVID-19 is disrupting engineering education and research globally, at all levels. While distance education is nothing new, the pandemic of COVID-19 forced instructors to rapidly move their courses online whether or not they’ve ever received training in online education. Engineering instructors, many of whom have courses with strong physical components, e.g., laboratory work, design projects, etc., have been particularly challenged to think about how students can achieve those same learning goals through remote instruction. Concurrently, these instructors’ personal lives, research programs, and administrative duties have also been disrupted. While the duration of the pandemic is unknown, it is becoming clear that what is happening right now will have long-term effects on many aspects of university operation and society as a whole. In this talk, Prof. Douglas will present both personal lessons from conducting research during the pandemic and the work-in-progress of a case study comparison of two engineering and engineering technology courses with substantial team and project components during the COVID-19 shift to online. Several sources of data are triangulated to understand how the instructor(s) approached the shift to online and how students perceived being supported before and during that time. Prof. Douglas will facilitate conversations about the initial findings and broader lessons for the engineering education research community on how social supports can enable us to thrive in a time when everything seems chaotic.

Speaker Bio

Professor Douglas is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She earned her PhD in Educational Psychology, with an emphasis on evaluation and measurement in 2012. Her research has focused on topics of evaluation and assessment in engineering education, including research to develop an evaluation framework for online engineering courses and research to improve the fairness of assessments used in engineering education research. She recently received an NSF award to study engineering instructor decisions and student support during COVID-19. Her research on evaluation of online learning (supported by two NSF awards #1544259,1935683) has resulted in more than 20 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications related to engineering learners in online courses. She was a FutureLearn Research Fellow from 2017-2019; a 2018 recipient of the FIE New Faculty Fellow Award and is the 2021 Program Chair for the Educational Research Methods Division of ASEE.