Rapid Transition from Offline to Online: The Teaching and Learning Experience in Engineering Education

Abstract

In the pre-COVID era, many engineering education academics shared that engineering education is challenging to conduct through online learning. They felt that teaching engineering deals with laborious calculations, and the need for physical presence for experiments and online education is difficult to be achieved. Nonetheless, COVID-19 forced education institutions to adopt the online learning model, which is the only way to continue learning during the Pandemic. From rejection to reception, the institutions put on the show to convert the lectures and assessments into the online version with various challenges such as lectures, connectivity issues, submission of assessment items, and even academic integrity on formal assessments. With an available Learning Management System, lectures, tutorials, laboratory sessions and examinations were conducted through the online platform. This paper illustrates the process of the conversion from traditional face-to-face teaching to online teaching and how academics and students cope with such transformation by maintaining consistent academic performance. In addition, a comparison of students’ academic performance face-to-face (pre-COVID) and online (during the Pandemic) shows the positive outcome of such conversion of teaching and learning activities. Lastly, a short discussion on the continuous improvement process was implemented to ensure that the adopted system is sustainable throughout the Pandemic.