Impact of COVID-19 on Engineering and Technology Course Outcomes

A planned, organized, and resourceful environment is important for expected student learning outcomes. However, the student learning experience can be disrupted significantly if the plan of study changes suddenly like it did due to the Covid-19 global pandemic in March 2020. The purpose of this paper is to compare the situations of two courses' outcomes such as student grades, number of students dropping the course, available resources, grading criteria, etc. before and during the pandemic. The compared two courses are from two separate departments where one course is Engineering Economics and another course is DC Circuits and Design. The course DC Circuits and Design has both theory and laboratory components. Engineering economics course was studied earlier by Alberts, Badar, & El-Mansour (2005) for engineering technology curriculum at Indiana State University. Now this course is taken by both engineering and engineering technology students. The course was offered in three sections in Spring 2019: two sections were taught in class (53 students) and another section via online (37 students). All the three sections were taught by the same instructor (Instructor 1). These sections were not hampered by any unwanted situations during the semester. In Spring 2020, four sections were offered: two on-campus sections with 16 and 32 students, and two online with 40 and 39 students. Two instructors: Instructor 1 and Instructor 2 taught the course. However, the world wide pandemic hit in the middle of the spring semester and all sections were changed to virtual mode. A comparison will be made between these two Spring semesters: 2019 and 2020 for this engineering economics course. In addition, we will compare the situation of a course that has laboratory component along with the theory component. It is an initial thought that the course with laboratory component may be affected more due to the pandemic situation. DC Circuits and Design course will fill this gap, i.e. to explore the effect of COVID-19 on a course with laboratory component. This course was taught by Author-2 in Fall 2019 to a class of 23 students. This section was not impacted by any unusual circumstances. During Fall 2020, two sections of this course one with 11 students and another one with 18 students are taught while maintaining the precautions for COVID-19. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the sudden change of instruction mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic has any effect on the course outcomes. If there are any impacts, what we can do in the future in case of such sudden change to address these.