Resilient Course Design for Teaching a Project-based Engineering Course Online

During emergency remote teaching situations caused by the COVID-19 crisis, students and instructors in higher education may be dealing with challenges and inequities including increased uncertainty over health, employment, and finances; inequitable access to synchronous learning opportunities; increased challenges in conducting accurate and equitable online assessments. For project-based electrical and computer engineering courses that involve hardware components and group work, additional challenges include limited or no access to facilities for experimental work; students cannot meet in person to conduct group work, especially for projects involving hardware integration. This paper describes methods that aimed to address these challenges to transition a project-based Design with Microprocessors course online during the COVID-19 pandemic. This course aims to teach microcontroller basics and microcontroller-based embedded system design. It is composed of weekly lectures, labs, and a term project, all based on the ARM® Cortex®-M4F based TI Tiva™ C TM4C123G LaunchPad. Every student purchases a LaunchPad as the only required course material. Before the course was transitioned to online format, students formed groups of two or three to complete the labs and project. During the transition to online learning, methods were developed to enhance resilience of students and affirm equity and accessibility for all, including 1) combining synchronous and asynchronous learning options to provide both flexibility and humanized interactions; 2) creating a course channel on Slack, a communication platform offering features such as chat rooms and direct messaging, to provide an alternative and more efficient way for class communication; 3) adjusting the term project to offer both group project and individual project options, minimize the requirement of additional hardware components for the project, and conduct project assessment with more focus on unit testing and system integration with some level of simulation instead of full hardware integration; 4) eliminating traditional exams, increasing the weight of labs and term project in the final grade, and designing a new tech interview-style coding exam; and 5) designing and distributing surveys before and during the transition to understand students' learning conditions, preferred teaching modes, and challenges before any decisions or changes were made to the course. According to the responses from an anonymous exit-class survey, the transition of this course received quite positive feedbacks from the students. To further improve online teaching effectiveness and ensure equity for all students, efforts will be focused on adding more interactive activities in online lectures to better engage students, exploring more convenient and equitable platforms for online assessment, and adding peer evaluation into group work assessment.