  Although online education has become a viable and major component of higher
education in many fields, its employment in engineering disciplines has been
limited. COVID-19 pandemic compelled the global and abrupt conversion of
conventional face-to-face instruction to the online format. The negative impact
of such sudden change is undeniable. Urgent and careful planning is needed to
mitigate pandemic negative effects on engineering education, especially for
vulnerable, disadvantaged, and underrepresented students who have to deal with
additional challenges (e.g. digital equity gap). To enhance engineering online
instruction during the pandemic era, we conducted an observational study at
California State University, Long Beach (a minority-serving institution). 110
faculty and 627 students from six engineering departments participated in our
surveys and answered quantitative and qualitative questions to highlight the
challenges they experienced during the online instruction in Spring 2020. In
this work, we present the results of these surveys in detail and propose
solutions to address the identified issues including logistical, technical,
learning/teaching challenges, assessment methods, and hands-on training. As the
pandemic continues, sharing these results with other educators can help with
more effective planning and choice of best practices to improve the online
engineering education during COVID-19 and beyond.
