An Empirical Analysis of Online Engineering Education during Lockdown Due to Pandemic

Abstract

With the rapid growth in internet and wireless communication technologies, online education is growing exponentially. The Covid-19 pandemic has revolutionized online education tremendously. The abrupt conversion from conventional face-to-face instruction delivery methods to online mode, compelled the teachers with limited skill, develop, deliver the content, assess and grade the students. This lead to various challenges for medical, science, engineering, arts, commerce and other vocational education sectors. The challenges faced by students and teachers are to be addressed for successful implementation and growth of online education. The common challenges like network connectivity issues, lack of appropriate electronic gadgets for learning, security and privacy concerns, difficulty in maintaining focus, socialization with peer group , lack of physical activities due to lockdown lead to health (physical and emotional)issues . For maximum efficacy of online learning and improve the learning outcomes, these challenges have to be addressed. The engineering education involves experiential learning along with conceptual understanding and numerical analysis associated with research oriented study. This makes it even more challenging for the online teaching- learning process. This survey based quantitative study is aimed at investigating the factors that affected the students and teachers while online classes were conducted for descriptive, numerical, analytical, and both hardware and software laboratory   courses during lockdown. A total of 34 teachers and 178 undergraduate students participated in the survey from The Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) , Electrical and Electronics Engineering(EEE) and Computer Science Engineering (CSE) disciplines. The data collected is analyzed to understand the factors affected their education and improve the quality of online education in the days to come.  We explored the challenges and discuss solutions for various types of   engineering course specific to circuit branches of engineering programs.