Case study of Innovative Teaching Practices and their Impact for Electrical Engineering Courses during COVID-19 Pandemic

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an urgent need to move to online teaching and develop innovations to guarantee the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are being fulfilled. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: the effects of an experimented teaching strategy, i.e. multi-course project-based learning (MPL) approach, are presented followed with online assessment techniques investigation for senior level electrical engineering (EE) courses at Qatar University. The course project of the senior course was designed in such a way that it helps in simultaneously attaining the objectives of the senior and capstone courses, that the students were taking at the same time. It is known that the MPL approach enhances the critical thinking capacity of students which is also a major outcome of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The developed project ensures the fulfillment of a series of SLOs, that are concentrated on soft engineering and project management skills. The difficulties of adopting the MPL method for the senior level courses are in aligning the project towards fulfilling the learning outcomes of every individual course. The study also provides the students feedback on online assessment techniques incorporated with the MPL, due to online teaching during COVID-19 pandemic. In order to provide a benchmark and to highlight the obtained results, the innovative teaching approaches were compared to conventional methods taught on the same senior course in a previous semester. Based on the feedback from teachers and students from previously conducted case study it was believed that the MPL approach would support the students. With the statistical analysis (Chi-square, two-tailed T statistics and hypothesis testing using z-test) it can be concluded that the MPL and online assessment actually help to achieve better attainment of the SLOs, even during a pandemic situation.