Digital learning, flipped teaching and the development of personal and professional skills during the second year of Covid-19 pandemic in engineering modules

A variety of teaching strategies has emerged in higher education since the closure of classrooms in March 2020 as a consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown. Instructors swapped the traditional teaching ways for technology-based approaches. No doubt, some features and techniques have come to stay. Yet many engineering courses during 2021 have applied the bimodal instruction in the context of a gradual return of professors and students to campus. This trend still goes on and has diverse benefits for institutions. Nevertheless, some negative impacts have been identified on students' readiness and goal achievements, requiring some reflection and suggesting some actions by higher education stakeholders. As students use digital devices in their personal and academic lives, the confidence placed in technology is driving a transformation toward processes of high quality teaching-learning. However, such a digitally-based training must address some challenges: achieving active learning, demonstrating significant learning, and avoiding an evident decay in transverse competences such as literacy, expression, transmission and writing skills, among others. This study puts into the spotlight two outcomes that seem to be achieved decreasingly over the years, in contrast with the expected ones: the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences and the ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies. Both outcomes, among others, have been targeted by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) for engineering students. Regarding the former, it appears mandatory that students enhance the so-called disciplinary writing, which encompasses completing the writing skills in their discipline of study to achieve the expected outcomes of their programs. The latter involves building some skills that students need to put into practice in their professional careers. This work proposes two actions based on the flipped teaching method to boost students' active learning and encourage their readiness and engagement linked to the above competences: the problem-based learning focused on teamwork and the assignments. They have been applied in engineering courses for the last four years and foreground notions of knowledge creation and literate practice in engineering. Firstly, the expected competences through the collaborative group work comprise: seeking for a topic-specific information, comprehension reading, applying new knowledge, interpreting a system's response, comparing responses, discussing arguments, deriving engineering design criteria and conclusions, and transmitting knowledge to colleagues. Secondly, assignments may help to foster students' readiness and disciplinary writing skills in engineering. A good academic practice involves understanding the assignment task, reading comprehension, doing the required research, planning the tasks, writing and reviewing. The experience shows that both actions fit well within a flipped learning model and can encourage students to engage in their autonomous learning, learn better, and emphasize the importance of student writing through appropriate writing assignments to develop personal and professional skills.