A Hybrid and Flexible Model for Structural Engineering Courses: Lessons Learnt During the Covid-19 Global Pandemic Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021This work presents the latest results on how to successfully apply a hybrid and flexible model for teaching Engineering Courses, particularly Structural Mechanics courses to students from Architecture and Civil Engineering programs during emergency conditions such as those due to the Covid19 Pandemic. This model has been used for the last few years with tremendous success in the performance of the students and their overall satisfaction as it has been shown in [1]. For the pandemic conditions, the synchronous sessions were changed from the classroom on campus to the online classroom with videoconferencing. Some new types of activities were included for online teaching such as video documentaries and also some modifications were made to the standard synchronous sessions, which are discussed in this work. A total of 200 students have taken the courses that use this model during the spring term, summer term and fall term of 2020. The students come from different cities across Mexico and are located in three different time zones. These students answered a survey that include several aspects of the online experience: problems faced by students when connecting online, type of connections available at their homes, preferred type of sessions, courses that are better suited for online teaching and their personal experience with the course, among others. This paper shows the results of the analysis of the questions answered by the students and some important graphs are included. Some recommendations are also given that future implementations of hybrid and flexible (HyFlex) models can take into account for a better overall experience of both, students and professors in Structural Engineering courses. This model can also be applied for the new normality where some toggle terms are expected, that is, some weeks on campus and some weeks with online teaching as new covid19 cases are detected in each region.

publication date

  • July 26, 2021