Topic Area: Pandemic Pivot
Presented by: Susan Masten, Lutgarde Raskin, Pedro D. Puente, Srijan Aggarwal, Mary Jo Kirisits
Abstract:
With the pivot to remote learning during the pandemic, professors across the globe were forced to consider how to teach laboratory courses remotely. What began with a discussion on academic Twitter in early Summer 2020, evolved into a Slack workgroup/learning community where environmental engineering faculty from across the US shared content and collaborated freely. Not wanting to move to video-taped laboratory sessions with students analyzing data generated by others, we focused our efforts on developing laboratory experiments that could be safely conducted at home with commercially available, inexpensive water test kits and common household items. Experiments included home water testing for disinfectant concentrations and hardness, anaerobic digestion of food waste, sampling plan development, kinetics of chlorine decay, statistical analyses, and soil testing. To meet ABET accreditation requirements, student teams designed and conducted experiments to respond to questions posed by clients. They exercised their technical communication skills by preparing professionally written reports and oral presentations for their clients. The response from the students was positive; many stated that their confidence in conducting experiments increased substantially during the semester and that they felt that they learned more in the remote environment than they would have in a regular laboratory course. A disadvantage of such an approach is that the methods and instruments are neither as accurate nor precise as compared to those available in a university teaching laboratory. Looking to the future, we believe that we can enhance student learning by combining the two approaches (home and university labs) even during in-person learning.