Learnings from the rapid online transition of a real-world project task-based engineering course

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents the results and learnings from a rapid and forced transition to online teaching of a campus-based and practical lab exercise intense course in robot engineering. Founded in previous pedagogical development work, we continued with activating and varied teaching methods connected through integrated project tasks. The online transition is evaluated from student course evaluations, examination results and the teachers’ experiences from ten campus course occasions and four online course occasions during ten years. The paper focuses specifically on the combination of an innovative online lecturing format and fully virtual robot lab exercises. Our aim is to present learnings of interest for the engineering education community. The results highlight a successful and appreciated online course transition, with possibly improved student learning. In particular the prerecorded video lectures were praised, the virtual labs was similarly appreciated as campus labs and it was demonstrated that online robot programming can be performed virtually, while practical lab exercises and study visits were still missed.