Offering Hands-on Manufacturing Workshops Through Distance Learning

This paper reports on how institutions collaborating on Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Smart Manufacturing (SM) have been able to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and be able to modify their planned activities in 2020 in an effort to continue delivering quality training and education to educators across the country. The pandemic made it impossible to offer the usual on-ground workshops to STEM educators and industrial practitioners. As a workaround, the project teams offered instructional delivery via Zoom and Microsoft Teams while also providing distance learning tools online. The best practices of the delivery and pros/cons of the operations will be presented with the feedback received from the participants.