Engineering Distance Learning: The Promise and Challenges of Microfluidics

The recent trend of expanding online education in science and engineering creates the need for remote experiential learning opportunities. Microfluidic devices show great promise in fulfilling that need because they are small, transportable, cheap, and use safe volumes of reagents to complete experiments. The rapid increase of microfluidic devices for point-of-care diagnostics serves as a proof of concept for remote learning applications. This perspective highlights potential scenarios and issues that need to be considered in translating multimodal microfluidics into educational settings. Several educational scenarios are developed, and a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats gap analysis highlights the barriers and opportunities for implementing microfluidics in the classroom or in online education formats. Providing students with microfluidic competencies in increasing diverse educational formats will create new opportunities as the microfabrication and diagnostics industries continue to grow.