Instructors at St. Clair College’s School of Engineering Technologies, Apprenticeship and Skilled Trades are using their ingenuity and their garages to teach hands-on courses to students online.
When the College was forced to abruptly suspend in-person learning in March 2020 due to COVID-19, instructors in all programs had to make a quick shift to online classes. Those whose courses require students to practice with equipment and technology they don’t have at home faced an extra challenge, even after some in-person classes resumed.
Thomas Forget, a professor in the Electromechanical Engineering Technician - Robotics program, said he was fortunate he could take home his classroom sidekick – an ABB YuMi collaborative robot.
He turned part of his garage into a lecture hall. With the two-armed robot at his elbow, he conducted interactive video lectures. Through trial and error, he learned how to make recordings that are engaging and easy to follow.
“At the beginning, it was hard for a lot of people,” Forget said. “It was just such a major shellshock.”
He started breaking the ice by inviting his first-year students to video chat open mic nights. Forget, a musician, showed them his drums, which are in the same sound-proof garage as his home lecture hall. Some of the students who played music pulled out their instruments. They jammed, chatted, drank coffee and got comfortable being in their new virtual classroom.
While Forget had a robot at home, his students did not. So, he made detailed videos of himself using the chimp sized YuMi and students had to point out what he was doing wrong.
In the fall of 2020, he taught a second-year robotic vision systems class entirely online with the YuMi’s help. This winter term, students in his first-year industrial robotics course have two classes on campus, where they practice with robots in a lab. On Fridays, Forget lectures from his garage.
“As I give the lecture, I’m able to show the robot doing the tasks I’m lecturing on,” he said. “So, it gives the students a good mindset about what’s going to happen next week when we’re face-to-face in the lab again.”
Forget sits in front of a green screen over which he projects a photo of the College lab filled with robots. He wants the students to feel like they’re in a familiar space. The lectures are recorded so students can review them.
Instructor-produced videos that guide students through lessons have improved the program, Forget said. He sees it continuing after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
Dale Haggith, co-ordinator of the Mechanical Engineering Technology – Automotive Product Design program, agrees.
When the College can return to full face-to-face classes, “I don’t think I want to lose some of the things that we’ve built,” he said, though he longs to get back in the classroom.
Haggith now spends most of his workdays in a 2,200-square-foot pole barn on his family’s rural property. It’s where he has his automotive shop and an office with particleboard walls.
On one wall of the office is a poster, given to him by his grandmother, that says: “Someday, everything will make perfect sense. For now, laugh at the confusion, smile through the tears and keep reminding yourself that everything happens for a reason.”
It is his motto for the pandemic, Haggith said. Despite the hectic pace, he sees it as an opportunity to reflect and re-evaluate. In the pole barn office, which also serves as the family movie theatre and games room, he juggles course schedules, reinvents classes and teaches online.
He is currently teaching a third-year engine design class with another instructor, who handles the in-class labs. For one assignment, students must use computer-aided design (CAD) to create a three-dimensional model of an engine cylinder. During class, the students make moulds of the engine intake and exhaust ports with playdough Haggith mixed up with his children. (“It actually works really well,” he says.) Students take the playdough moulds home to complete the measurements they need for the CAD work. It’s just one component of an assignment that had to be changed for online delivery.
Students are also learning to write proper emails and communicate professionally online, Haggith said. “It’s pushed us into preparing our students across the board to being prepared for real life, being prepared for proper employment.”
Waseem Habash, St. Clair’s Vice President, Academic, said many policies had to be reviewed and changed to adjust to online delivery of programs. He said every course in each of the 100-plus programs across the institution was assessed.
“Some days, it felt hopeless,” he said. “We asked ourselves how can we graduate students when they are missing essential outcomes that must be delivered in face-to-face traditional labs?”
But Habash said he has been astounded by the ingenuity of the faculty to continue delivering their programs with very few hiccups. “This is where the innovation of St. Clair College staff rose above the ordinary,” Habash said.
Students have adapted, but some are more comfortable being in a classroom and asking questions in person, said Ryan Pepper, co-ordinator of the two-year Electrical Engineering Technician program at the College’s Chatham campus.
Pepper admits that despite being tech savvy, he has learned some new tricks teaching online. “I never had a YouTube account before,” he says.
When all classes went online in March 2020, Pepper took home two electrical controllers, some networking equipment and a variable frequency drive to finish teaching second-year courses about programmable controllers and industrial networking.
Normally, students would be in a lab hardwiring and programming the controllers. Instead, Pepper sat at his kitchen table with two controllers demonstrating as he broadcast or recorded everything using a laptop and cellphone.
A few times, one of his three children made an appearance in the background. They were fascinated when he fashioned a sheet metal box to hold one of the controllers to make it safe to use at home, Pepper said.
Since September, the electrical engineering tech instructors and students have been able to return to hands-on labs on campus, though in smaller groups and with added safety protocols due to COVID-19. Pepper’s home classroom for lectures is now in a basement office he shares with his wife, a St. Clair nursing instructor.
“So, it hasn’t affected my fall and winter as much as last spring,” he said.
For Tim Tiegs, co-ordinator for electrical apprenticeships at the College’s main Windsor campus, the first question when COVID-19 hit a year ago wasn’t how to move on online. It was whether to continue at all. While other apprenticeship classes at the College were suspended, Tiegs made a pitch to keep offering them to electrical apprentices.
Unlike students in other programs, the 700 to 800 apprentices who normally attend College classes annually work full time in their fields, often going to classes after work. Of those, about 200 are electrical apprentices.
Tiegs and the five other faculty members decided they could keep the electrical apprenticeship classes going, if they didn’t teach like they were in a classroom.
“We had to change our mindset as to what it meant to be online. With very little or no resources to go to at that point, we kind of had to make up our own idea of that,” Tiegs said.
They use artificial intelligence software that gives students a virtual lab to practise techniques and skills, much as they would play video games.
Instructors have created short instructional video podcasts. They are available during the online class time and have students break up into small groups to work out problems to keep them engaged.
Students have been innovative, too, said Tiegs. Three electrical apprentices tasked with showing the relationship between pressure, volume and flow designed a pressure gauge with a valve they attached to a garden hose. They made a demonstration video for the class in one student’s garage.
Some in-class labs resumed in the summer and fall, Tiegs said, but everyone was able to quickly pivot back to all-online instruction in January when the region was in COVID-19 lockdown.
There were stumbles and technical glitches along the way, but instructors adapted, and the new approach is working, he said. “It’s uncomfortable because it’s different. It’s not uncomfortable because it’s not good.”