IMPLEMENTATION OF E-PRACTICAL LESSONS DURING PANDEMIC

The education sector was not sparred from the impact of Covid-19 and was forcefully made to adapt to the rapid changes arising from virus situations in various countries as necessary measures were implemented to prevent the virus surge and protect life. In the mist of the pandemic, learning should not be stopped even though lock-down and restrictive measures were placed. In the context of engineering education, lab practical sessions are paramount to the learning of the students where practical hands-on provide the students with the necessary experiences to complement their theoretical studies. With several schools been closed and switching to remote online education, the impact of lab practical studies was major as students were no longer able to return to school to use their equipment for learning and to perform their lab experiment. Through the exploitation of technologies, School of EEE (Singapore Polytechnic) addressed the challenges of e-practical disruptions which Singapore students faced during the “Circuit Breaker'’ (CB) period in an innovative approach. During the CB, e-practical videos were produced for modules where learning were directly affected due to closure of labs as students were not allow to return to school to carry out day-to-day learning. The lab videos were designed to be short to enable micro-learning, allowing the students to better focus on the bite-sized content while enabling one to study individually at home through a flipped approach. Attributing to the joint effort and hard work from both teaching and technical staff in the video creation and editing process, the school was able to deploy e-practical videos to students weekly since the start of the “Circuit Breaker”. Till to date, more than 450 labs videos were created and deployed across different modules. With SP transition into “safe re-opening’' as virus situation in Singapore gets better, the lab videos were further improved and now jointly utilised as part of the students’ learning complementing other module materials. During the CB, a survey was carried out for more than 300 students who utilised the lab videos and results showed that more than 80% of the students found the lab videos to be useful in their learning and aided them in understanding the topic better while they carried out their full HBL.