Online Teaching of Digital Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The previous years have brought a major disruption with the COVID-19 outbreak, and universities around the world had to quickly adapt to the new format of teaching and learning. Different fields faced various obstacles in trying to provide the best possible classroom-like experience to students during the lockdown. For engineering study programs, especially in the courses where the laboratory is very important, it was a difficult task to replicate the syllabus in the online domain. This paper presents experiences from online teaching of the Digital System Design course at the University of Novi Sad. Traditional and online variants of the course are presented and compared, with the focus on laboratory exercises which were the most difficult to adapt. In addition, student experiences are summarized and compared to experiences in the previous years when the course was held traditionally.