  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an urgent need to move to online
teaching and develop innovations to guarantee the Student Learning Outcomes
(SLOs) are being fulfilled. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: the
effects of an experimented teaching strategy, i.e. multi-course project-based
learning (MPL) approach, are presented followed with online assessment
techniques investigation for senior level electrical engineering (EE) courses
at Qatar University. The course project of the senior course was designed in
such a way that it helps in simultaneously attaining the objectives of the
senior and capstone courses, that the students were taking at the same time. It
is known that the MPL approach enhances the critical thinking capacity of
students which is also a major outcome of Education for Sustainable Development
(ESD). The developed project ensures the fulfillment of a series of SLOs, that
are concentrated on soft engineering and project management skills. The
difficulties of adopting the MPL method for the senior level courses are in
aligning the project towards fulfilling the learning outcomes of every
individual course. The study also provides the students feedback on online
assessment techniques incorporated with the MPL, due to online teaching during
COVID-19 pandemic. In order to provide a benchmark and to highlight the
obtained results, the innovative teaching approaches were compared to
conventional methods taught on the same senior course in a previous semester.
Based on the feedback from teachers and students from previously conducted case
study it was believed that the MPL approach would support the students. With
the statistical analysis (Chi-square, two-tailed T statistics and hypothesis
testing using z-test) it can be concluded that the MPL and online assessment
actually help to achieve better attainment of the SLOs, even during a pandemic
situation.
