Background and Scope
The CoViD19 pandemic has affected all aspects of daily life including university education. While many lectures and seminars transitioned more or less smoothly to online versions around the globe, there is anecdotic evidence that this has happened to a much smaller extent for lab courses, i.e., that a substantial number of labs got cancelled, postponed, or replaced by other courses as an emergency measure.
Nonetheless, there is amble work to investigate online teaching elements in the context of lab courses. But the investigated methods and implementations are typically far from being sufficient to allow Project Based Learning, which has a strong tradition in engineering education and for which a substantial amount of evidence for its benefits exists. This discrepancy may also be a factor why the physical presence of students in labs still seems to be considered to be an absolute necessity in parts of the engineering education community.
In this project, a set-up was set-up as a proof-of-concept that Project Based Learning can be conducted in an online fashion in engineering education. While being based on marine robotics, it includes general aspects of the engineering curriculum with respect to highly relevant topics in modern high-impact technologies like robotics, automation, and AI. In doing so, the project built upon the project Applied Education in the Digitalization Age (Hands-On 4.0).
The Corona pandemic happened during the project and while it was a severe challenge for education in general and hands-on education in particular, it also offered opportunities to investigate online teaching for robotics [2][3][4]. In [1], the results of a survey are presented that was conducted during the project to see how instructors handled hands-on robotics teaching under the severe constraints of the pandemic. A second study was conducted 5 years after the Corona pandemic to sample the state of robotics labs and other hands-on teaching [5], which also covers the the question if and to which extent there are lasting effects of the pandemic.
Publications
There are several publications related to the project (you can get publications marked with [Open Access] by a click on the DOI link; for other publications, click on [Preprint PDF] to get a preprint copy via ResearchGate):
[1] A. Birk and D. Simunovic, “Robotics Labs and Other Hands-On Teaching During COVID-19: Change Is Here to Stay?,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), vol. 28, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2021.3102979 [Open Access]
[2] A. Birk, E. Dineva, F. Maurelli, and A. Nabor, “A Robotics Course during CoViD-19: Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Online Teaching beyond the Pandemic,” Robotics, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010005 [Open Access]
[3] F. Maurelli, E. Dineva, A. Nabor, and A. Birk, “Robotics and Intelligent Systems: a new curriculum development and adaptations needed in Coronavirus times,” in Robotics in Education (RiE), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2021, pp. 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82544-7_9
[4] A. Birk and E. Dineva, “Improved Students’ Performance in an Online Robotics Class During COVID-19: Do only Strong Students Profit?,” in Robotics in Education (RiE), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2021, pp. 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82544-7_13 [Preprint PDF]
[5] A. Birk, “In-Presence, Take-Home, and Online Education: The State of Equipment Use and Practices in Robotics Labs and Other Hands-On Activities,” IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 171984-171997, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3614055
Acknowledgements
The project was financed by the Jacobs Foundation within the B3 – Bildung Beyond Boundaries framework.