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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.
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Applying Classroom Practices Learned from Virtual Professional Development During a Pandemic
This paper reflects upon the challenges of teacher pro- fessional development, designed primarily for high school physics teachers, where both content and format were unfa- miliar. The content focus was quantum information science (QIS), and the original face-to-face (F2F) environment shifted to an online virtual with only a few months of plan- ning. As a result of C-19, many states are now implementing changes to K–12 education such as virtual options for cours- es or some type of hybrid learning environment.4 Therefore, identifying and addressing the challenges faced in providing virtual professional development may be of use to other ed- ucators who need to incorporate similar elements in virtual environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048691
- PAR ID:
- 10491681
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIP
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Physics Teacher
- Volume:
- 62
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0031-921X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 41 to 46
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Quantum, Teacher professional development, STEM
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0107084
