Dr Michele Spadari, who trained at the University of Parma in Italy before completing his PhD at the University of Newcastle, says while he misses the human interaction, like every good engineer, he enjoyed the challenge of transitioning laboratory and field components into the digital campus. He says, “the pandemic will have a lasting impact on how we teach first year engineering subjects.”
Alex agrees; “the laboratory environment has been the area that caused the most work and required quickest adaptation.
For an introduction course to electrical engineering, students normally get a chance to sit in a laboratory and work with real equipment, measure signals, and so on, to be hands on with the concepts that they work with on paper. Losing the lab environment meant re-writing lab tasks to be performed online… Overall, we deliver something that is pretty close to a ‘hands-on’ experience, but one that is enhanced through the opportunities of digital communication tools.”
Major factors in the smooth transition to the Navitas digital campus are smaller class sizes and the ability to provide highly personalised support to students. This signature feature of Navitas pathway colleges facilitated the move in a way that much larger first year units at partner universities couldn’t transition to so quickly.
But beyond the short-term utility of being able to continue teaching engineering with campus closures, the digital campus experience of 2020 has fundamentally reshaped engineering teaching for good. “I am very positive about the future of distance teaching and hope we may even discover new teaching methods,” says Dariusz. Alex concurs, “lab-based work will continue to be difficult, but I think this will lead to a shift towards a blended learning environment and can, in some cases, be side-stepped by adapting to our use of simulations and recordings…