How Pivoting to Remote and Online Teaching Impacted Biological and Biomedical Engineering Students Engagement

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of courses at all educational levels worldwide had to shift to remote teaching from face-to-face. Since the courses were not initially designed for online education, we need to understand the issues both students and instructors faced during this unplanned shift. Also, before the pandemic, only a portion of students had experience with online education, although it was successfully implemented in many different areas. This arbitrary shift provides an excellent opportunity for students to have an overall opinion about this course delivery method at a more significant ratio. This forced online learning experience offered potential opportunities (e.g., successful online lab experiences) and possible barriers (e.g., time, technology, mental health, limited interaction) that need further investigation. This paper presents the survey data collected during the Spring and Fall of 2020 from Biomedical/biological Engineering students to examine perceived barriers of online learning and impacts on course performance in order to provide support for students in the future online and remote experience.