From Face to Face to Hybrid Teaching: an Experience on Process Plant Automation Laboratory Course during Global Pandemic

The COVID19 pandemic has created tremendous challenges in the learning and education sector. Schools and universities are forced to close and most teaching activities have to be organized with very limited physical and social interaction between the teachers and students, and also among students. This is particularly difficult for certain learning activity, such as laboratory work where it usually involve the student’s direct interaction with equipments in the school and sometimes the need to work together with the their peers in the same space while interacting with the equipments. This paper presents an experience in shifting the delivery method of a process automation laboratory course at Aalto University from face to face teaching into hybrid due to the restrictionc caused by the pandemic. This paper describes the rework process of the course to realize this shift, and after the course, feedbacks are gathered from the student to see if the approach taken is welcomed by the students. The feedback appears promising, indicating 66% of the respondents agree that they like the hybrid method approach considered.