Enhancing student engagement and connecting theory to practice in materials engineering: bridging experiential learning opportunities through a virtual “classroom” for first-year learners

Abstract Authors: Bosco Yu; Liza-Anastasia DiCecco; Dakota M. Binkley; Hatem Zurob Modern tools and technology that facilitate remote learning provide educators with exciting opportunities to transform traditional lecture-based education to be more engaging and experiential. The traditional approach relies on a lesson sequence of lectures where abstract knowledge is almost "spoon fed" to students in the most efficient manner to reach a large class size. This approach tends to lack of student engagement elements, putting learners in the mindset that lectures are simply a means of acquiring information to pass a final exam. This defeats the purpose of engineering education: connecting scientific theory to engineering practice while solving real-world problems. A more hands-on and experiential approach will increase student engagement and give students the confidence to tackle complex, open-ended, and multi-disciplinary engineering challenges. This year, McMaster University faced a major challenge as well as an opportunity to reimagine the classroom: designing a new curriculum for the first-year engineering cohort with a class size of ~1200 students, while at the same time transition to a remote learning environment due to the global pandemic. How can we encourage student engagement, and student connection of theory to practice in lectures with such a large class size? This issue is now amplified during the pandemic, when students from around the world are attending classes remotely, dealing with screen fatigue and distractions from social media and technology. Inspired by teaching programs in many business schools that prioritize interactive learning based on real-world case studies, we propose to develop a set of interactive online materials science lectures to promote i) student engagement and ii) experiential learning. To encourage students to learn foundational scientific knowledge of materials science while being motivated by the chance to exercise their creativity in solving realistic design problems, we have implemented a set of laboratory activities with in-class demonstrations, case studies, virtual emulators, and engineering design projects that utilize several education design tools: ANSYS-Granta Edupack for materials selection and Adobe Inventor for modeling, where students can have hands-on experience of "learning by doing" in a remote learning environment. In the following academic year, we plan to incorporate the above engineering design tools into the lecture-based portion of the course as well, to create interactive lecture content. Quantitative and qualitative pedagogical analysis will be triangulated to the level of engagement as well as the effectiveness of this new lecture structure. The success of students learning to connect theory to practice will be assessed by comparing performance on selected exam questions versus performance of students from previous class structures. Analysis of results will guide educators to re-design the current course, other upper year experiential learning-based courses, as well as the overall engineering curriculum based on students' expectations and career aspirations.