Industrial and systems engineering elevates online academic experience
Published: Apr 10, 2023 3:00 PM
By Carla Nelson
As the professor for the Tiger Motors Lean Engineering Lab, one of the more popular labs in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, Tom Devall regularly hears from online graduate students that they would love the opportunity to participate more in lab activities.
“The online students have felt a little left out,” Devall said. “We have wanted to make it a better experience for them for a while.”
The industrial and systems engineering lab, commonly referred to as the LEGO Lab, allows campus students to experience a hands-on learning approach to best manufacturing practices by emulating a high-volume auto plant. When industrial and systems engineering doctoral student Victoria Ballard began working as a teaching assistant (TA) in the lab last year, she heard the same desire from the online students. At the time, online students did not have lab assignments, only weekly quizzes.
“Videos would be posted online after each production run to let the online students know what happened in the lab, but they had no activities related to what we were doing and they didn’t have that connection with the space,” Ballard said. “I saw a huge void there and a desire for them to want to connect with this amazing lab that we have.”
Ballard, a veteran online educator of 13 years, used her experience creating online content to develop lab activities for the online students that paralleled the on-campus activities. Starting this fall, online students have a comparable lab activity for each on-campus lab. A variety of methods including pre-recorded videos and live sessions have made this possible.
This fall, the graduate students began using cell phones to broadcast lab activities through Zoom by using harness straps to attach them to their chest, which allowed the online students to watch a live stream of lab activities or the recorded version later. This also allowed the students to ask questions and chat with the teaching assistants during the lab. The students were then given the assignment to follow a particular manager, which is a graduate student in the lab setting, and give them performance evaluations on their leadership skills and ideas on how to improve the quality and productivity of their manufacturing cell.
“Online students appreciated being included in the labs live, but expressed frustration with the bouncy video and poor audio of the zoom camera system … there were a lot of issues,” Ballard said.
The Tiger Motors team decided to work to install high-quality cameras and microphones in the lab to make the experience better. The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering recently invested $26,000 in the lab to install five ultra-HD digital cameras that can pan and zoom, five wireless microphones, and 10 drop-down mics that can capture all five areas of the lab. During broadcast, students can log on to Panopto to view several camera angles, listen in, and chat live with TAs.
“Now we’re thinking of different ways to use this space in a live, interactive sense that we haven’t had the option to do before,” Ballard said. “We’re really excited to make Tiger Motors the premier lean education experience for both campus and online students alike.”
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Victoria Ballard, a veteran online educator of 13 years, used her experience creating online content to develop lab activities for the online students that paralleled the on-campus activities.
