Student Perspectives on Online Hybrid Learning in an Undergraduate Robotics Course

Abstract

Many institutions in higher education worldwide are transforming classes into online courses, or into hybrid courses with students participating both physically in the classroom and digitally through video conferencing software. The latter is a growing trend for multi-campus institutions offering the same courses to multiple campuses. Hybrid courses with synchronous learning activities requires a careful balance when designing student-active learning methods between focusing on the students physically present in the classroom, and the students participating online. In this paper, a set of online hybrid student-active learning activities were implemented for a third year robotics course, and we present student perspectives on online hybrid learning collected from surveying students on what learning tools were perceived as useful for their learning. The results show that students generally appreciate how digital tools can activate students in online hybrid learning, and are especially positive to short lecturing videos, online interactive quizzes, and anonymous digital whiteboards for questions and comments. However, results also show that students do not rate online hybrid learning as equally good when compared to face-to-face lectures, and are ambivalent on whether they achieve the learning outcomes equally well through an online hybrid course design. We believe that the results presented in this paper can be of help to teachers designing student-active learning activities for online hybrid courses in general, and highlight some of the learning tools that students give good ratings as helpful for engaging a more student-active learning approach to hybrid engineering courses.