Remote staff support

The final category is the collection of tactics that can be employed to provide remote access to the function of teaching staff, that would normally be available during in-lab practicals. Experienced practical engineering educators:

• Ensure sessions run to plan and maintain students’ concentration and momentum.

• Monitor situations requiring attention to dynamically adjust methods, including safety concerns.

• Provide assistance when required to ensure all students are able to deliver the final results of the tasks or extend learning beyond the structured activity.

• Gather formal and non formal feedback about the student experience.

A number of tactics can be deployed to replicate staff involvement in a remote format to provide these functions.

Digital video conference tools can be used when practicals are delivered in a synchronous format (or an asynchronous delivery format made synchronous when bound by predefined start and end times).

Session planning can be replicated remotely with clearly labeled milestones. Milestones can be facilitated by virtual learning environments though the use of “adaptive release”, i.e. downstream parts of an activity are only accessible once an upstream task has met a certain set of conditions.

The processing of numerical data can be performed remotely with “check my answer” spreadsheets that compare the steps in a student's work to the “correct” answer and allow them to debug where mistakes have occurred. Such spreadsheets can emulate a teaching assistant working through calculation steps to provide bespoke feedback, rather than simply giving away “correct” answers.

Finally, feedback from sessions can be gathered using existing online tools such as surveys and polls.