Reflections Part III: Experience in distance learning helped WE professor navigate autumn 2020

In the final part of our three-part Reflections series, Dr. Carolin Fink and Scott Sheffield describe the unconventionality of autumn 2020 semester.

Professor Fink has been a professor with our welding engineering program since 2017. The unanticipated events that accompany a global pandemic forced professors to proceed with trepidation yet maintain strength and consistency while instructing. Efforts like those of Dr. Fink and Dr. Elvin Beach, who was highlighted in the first part of this series, allowed students opportunities to learn complex disciplines while adapting to unprecedented circumstances.

Dr. Fink taught WE4112 and WE7112 Weldability during autumn 2020. Pupils ranged from 14 undergraduate students to nine graduate students and 16 distance students. Both sections of the weldability class, which are traditionally in-person, were virtual with no hybrid option.

Virtual instruction usually presents a level of uncertainty for the professor. It is more difficult to gauge a student’s understanding of content and practice. Technical challenges and language barriers present additional hazards. Dr. Fink’s expectations of the virtual environment met her expectations in most areas and exceeded her expectations in others, “Autumn 2020 certainly met my expectations in terms of student engagement in the ‘classroom’. I typically get the very engaged students – the ones who would stay to talk to me afterwards if it was an ordinary semester.”

One segment of her students excelled in the virtual environment, “The distance students were a positive surprise to me. They were more engaged in autumn 2020, which could be because they were also working from home during the pandemic. These students did not typically have the opportunity to attend live lectures prior to autumn 2020, so their contributions were very valuable.”

Ohio State has made accessibility and accommodations readily available due to altered learning environments. Professor Fink said that she expected far more requests for accommodations, such as captioning, screen readers and deadline extensions but admits that students may have been uncomfortable about requesting accommodations.

Dr. Fink did not find teaching during autumn 2020 any harder than usual but delayed the plans she had to refresh course content due to time limitations. Transferring in-person exams to the university’s online platform was quite time consuming, especially while sharing a home office with her two-year-old son.

Converting lessons to a completely virtual transmission was no sweat for Dr. Fink, who teaches in the distance learning WE graduate program. “I think the virtual environment worked well for most students based on the feedback I got. And I think the reason for this is the extensive experience of our WE faculty in distance education.”

Like Dr. Beach, Dr. Fink got creative when helping with labs, “It was harder for me to help them with lab experiments or microscopy since I was not with them in the lab”. Her graduate students attended a weekly group meeting on Zoom to recap to-dos and share successful practices. “All of them did their best to make progress on their graduate research projects and keep me updated.”

What was fairly easy in teaching was countered in other areas. Dr. Fink found little time to dedicate to her own research, particularly in writing. An active toddler competing for mom’s attention meant for long days and different degrees of productivity. “This has really impacted my ability to carve out longer stretches of time for concentrated writing. I had to put a lot of collaborations and papers on hold.”

Dr. Fink had a class of 70 students, which demanded a bit more of her time. She built weekly graded quizzes into the autumn 2020 curriculum for various reasons. The quizzes were meant to keep students engaged. They also allowed her to gauge comprehension and the effectiveness of her instructional delivery, which would steer adjustments for upcoming semesters. If a student was not keeping up with the quizzes, Professor Fink would reach out to them to see if they needed extra help or accomodations.

Scott Sheffield

Scott Sheffield took Dr. Fink’s WE 4112 Weldability class in autumn 2020. It was his first experience taking a WE class online. He liked the bi-weekly synchronous format, which offered forgiveness if there was a scheduling conflict and offered support as a reference.

The small class size fostered meaningful discussions and provided more opportunities to ask questions during lecture. There was plenty of engagement with classmates, which was especially useful at the end of the semester when each student presented a case study on weld failure. “The assignment was to find an article about a real-world failure and perform an analysis of the failure using the information we learned from class. It was valuable to be able to apply concepts to a real-world application and also listen and discuss other students’ presentations about their weld failure topics.”

Sheffield credits Dr. Fink for making resources available that helped with material comprehension and the transition to distance learning. “I used the synchronous lectures as my main source of content. In addition to that, Dr. Fink posted relevant readings from the class textbooks prior to lectures, so there was another source to learn from. I also appreciated how she provided her 2019 class lecture recordings and Dr. Lippold’s lecture recordings from a previous year. I found it really helpful to have the complicated topics explained in more than one way.” TA’s were also regularly available for extra support.

Technology presented minor challenges as everyone adjusted to Zoom and other online resources. “I think a lecture recording didn’t function properly a time or two, but Dr. Fink made previous years’ lectures available, so it was not a huge issue. Carmen was always really organized with content and made the schedule easy to follow.”

Sheffield graduates in May and is headed back to Medtronic in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He interned with them in summer 2019. “I will be returning to their research and development welding engineering team where I will work with laser and resistance welding processes to produce components of medical devices.” He was awarded the Welding Engineering Senior Scholar Award in February for highest GPA.

Thanks to Dr. Carolin Fink and Scott Sheffield for sharing their autumn 2020 experiences.

Libby Culley, Department of Materials Science and Engineering Communications, culley.36@osu.edu