Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Engineering Education: Case Study with the Online Laboratory NCSLab

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has changed education, which stimulated the adoption of online teaching and learning. Therefore, the research on the impact of COVID-19 on online laboratories, which can be used for online teaching and learning assessment, is crucial to enlighten the effects of COVID-19 on engineering education. Using the online laboratory Networked Control System Laboratory (NCSLab) as a case study, the research in this paper is aimed to fill the gap of COVID-19 on education by exploring the visitors and users of this online laboratory. To illustrate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a special 100-day time slot in 2020 within the COVID-19 pandemic is selected, and data are collected from a web analytics tool and records in the NCSLab database. For comparison, corresponding data in 2018 and 2019 are also collected within a specific 100-day time slot. The results show that there is an increase in both the numbers of visitors and users to NCSLab, and an increase in experiment configurations during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with the previous two years in 2018 and 2019, which indicates that more learners are seeking alternatives for remote learning. The evaluation results show that the online laboratory is helpful to the comprehension of course content and achieves intended outcomes, while the use of online laboratories as a replacement for traditional laboratories is controversial. As the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may continue for years globally, the research in this paper could provide insights for future research and development of online laboratories and also for other online education platforms.