Session: 09-08-01: Distance/Online Engineering Education, Models and Enabling Technologies

Paper Number: 72341

Start Time: Tuesday, 11:05 AM

72341 - Distance/Online Engineering Education During and After COVID-19: Graduate Teaching Assistant’s Perspective 

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced universities across the globe to transition over to a distance/online mode of teaching during the Spring of 2020. Even though many universities in the US have been historically offering some form of online education, a sudden shift to online mode in the middle of a regular semester has severely challenged both the faculty and students. Numerous innovative techniques and modern technology resources were developed and made available for the faculty and students to help them adapt to the new instruction mode. Classes were made available either in the form of live synchronous sessions where the classes were held at a predetermined scheduled over video conferencing software or classes were pre-recorded and made available to students to be viewed at any time according to their convenience. In engineering courses with labs, instructors had additional challenges switching over to online mode. In many cases, efforts were made to prerecord the lab experiments and experimental observations were provided to students. Even with all the meticulous efforts to mirror the in person teaching experience to the virtual mode, it can be argued that STEM education, especially Engineering Education was worst affected by the online mode of instruction owing to its “hands-on” nature.

 

The least discussed topic in this scenario though, is about the graduate students who teach or assist teaching process. Numerous graduate students across many universities, especially in the US, who were in different capacities such as instructors of record, lab instructors, teaching assistants, graders and tutors were equally affected by the pandemic. Since many graduate students take courses and help teach, the challenges they face are totally different from the rest of the community. Even though numerous articles and online sources cite a variety of issues and strategies associated with online teaching, most of them are from a full-time instructor’s perspective. It can be reasoned that the thoughts and views of a full-time instructor can be very different from a student instructor and the articles in literature may not be suitable for the graduate student community. Moreover, it has been identified that there are very few resources tailor made for graduate students who might be teaching classes. This article thus tries to bridge this gap by exploring the challenges posed by the sudden transition to the distance/online teaching mode from a graduate student’s perspective. Based on the teaching experience gained by the author before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the three semesters that were severely affected by the pandemic, potential solutions to some of the challenges and future opportunities are also identified. It is hoped that this article might help current and future graduate student teaching assistants to be better prepared for future emergencies or abrupt changes in teaching modes.

Presenting Author: Vishnu Kumar Pennsylvania State University

Authors:

Vishnu Kumar Pennsylvania State University