Engineering Student's Flexibility for Learning During Education Disruption

Due to the recent education disruption, engineering-related module classes have to rapidly and effectively move online because of unpredictable changes. For design-related technical modules, not much literature focused on how students and tutors can adopt the latest technologies in a relatively short span. This paper is an effort to find students' experiences and preferences around various interactive educational tools used in online synchronous teaching, such as interactive live zoom lectures, slide annotations, breakout rooms, recorded videos, and many more, which have been used at the University of Glasgow, Singapore, for the module known as Design and Manufacture 1, during the 2021 COVID-19 crisis and beyond. From this work, we were able to find how an online synchronous learning approach affects design engineering students' learning experience. To understand students' perception of online learning tools to be effective in enhancing their learning during a sudden change in the arrangement of physical classes to online classes due to the pandemic situation. Survey results were collected using google forms at the end of the trimester, which was offered to 65 students enrolled in the module based on the student experience. The response rate is around 70%. The survey result showed that students engaged very well with the technologies and took little time to adjust to online learning. Students found learning very comfortable using the latest online teaching tools during their online learning journey in the design engineering module.