A large integrated online hardware design course

A large integrated online hardware design course Abstract We know teachers engage with primary school students in close proximity and lead class from the front of the room in secondary school. Despite the distance between a professor and students having increased ten-fold in large lecture halls at post-secondary institutions, most students still receive instantaneous feedback from educators, and there is a tangible physical presence of others felt in the room. The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed the traditional educational model that we have known since 1635 – the creation of the first public school in America. The physical distancing requirement has erected an immeasurable barrier between educators and students overnight. Educators had to drastically change their teaching strategy to adapt to a virtual environment. In this paper, we share our personal experience in developing an online course at one of Canada's most prestigious post-secondary institutions, and our perspective in future online education. The first step in building an online course is determining the mode of delivery, synchronous or asynchronous lectures. We chose the asynchronous model for our 2nd year Digital Systems course. The driving factor was the geographic spread of our cohort across multiple time zones. Asynchronous teaching allows all students equal access to course materials at their own schedule and pace. Instead of pre-recording 39 one-hour long lectures, we opted for a different approach. We produced 140 short videos, each covering a single concept. Our main concerns were the attention span of online learners, the effectiveness of our lectures, and the clarity of the presentation. For a hardware design course, a crucial hurdle to cross is to instill the experiences of hands-on practice into an online platform. For example, the labs of the original course required field programmable-gated array chips on physical boards. In order to preserve the opportunity for students to learn hardware design by seeing lights, digital displays and controls in a physical laboratory, we built a virtual GUI interface. Teaching assistants conducted video conferencing sessions with students to enhance the practical experience. We ran an interactive discussion board to facilitate learning and video chat office hours to increase the human interaction. After overcoming the major obstacle of online content delivery, we had to deal with one of the most contentious issues for online courses - assessment. Many institutions have adopted proctoring software such as Examity and ProctorU; however, our faculty has rejected proctoring software because of heightened student stress and equity issues. We developed a two-stage assessment process comprised of a timed written test, followed by a short video interview. We believe that the interview served as a strong deterrent for cheating. Out of 340 students, we flagged six as potential cases of academic misconduct, and ultimately achieved a grade distribution similar to previous years. The pandemic has brought new challenges to traditional educational systems. We answered that challenge by offering this online course to a class of 340 students successfully. Our unique integrated approach that combined asynchronous content delivery with synchronous practical experience created a more effective learning environment for students compared to other online courses from Coursera or MIT MOOC. Students voted our course as one of the best courses in the fall semester. Our experience has taught us that early and thorough planning, efficient and continuous technical support, and time investment are essential for building effective online courses. There is a strong shift towards online education at universities and colleges for reasons of accessibility, as well as economies of scale. The lessons learned through this experience will help guide us in the future.