There have been many questions and concerns raised by educators about how advanced technology students will adapt to remote learning during the COVID era. What will technician students’ academic engagement and persistence be like, and how will online learning affect their educational outcomes? What do technician students like about remote learning and what do they find challenging? What does online learning mean for hands-on applied and experiential learning, which are hallmarks of technical education programs? This paper explores pilot survey data collected in Florida from advanced technology students at two-year colleges. Five primary areas covered in the survey include enrollment status, access to technology, experience using a Learning Management System and learning online, impact on applied and experiential learning, and students’ background information.
Key findings include decreased interaction between peers, increased reliance on instructors, and a significant decline in experiential learning such as labs, group projects, demonstrations, problem-based learning, and service-learning. The majority of students report feeling worried about making progress toward their degree, and about half worried about completing the semester. Two benefits students identified as having access to course materials all the time through the LMS and the flexibility of remote learning. Findings also show that technician students are quite diverse by way of age, partner status, having a family, race-ethnicity, employment status, and educational background. About one-third of students who responded are women.
This paper concludes with several recommendations about the application of these research findings to address challenges technician students face learning online, including specific actions that instructors and programs can pursue to help retain students and provide support through the completion of degree programs.
Dr. Marilyn Barger is the Director of FLATE, the Florida Advanced Technological Education Center a part of the FloridaMakes Network, and previously funded by the National Science Foundation. FLATE serves the state of Florida as its region and is involved
Lakshmi Jayaram is President of the Inquiry Research Group LLC and Policy Fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She received her doctorate in sociology from the Johns Hopkins University and specializes in qualitative and mixed methods research, with a focus on education, social disparities, and policy-relevant studies. She is Co-Principal Investigator of an NSF-funded longitudinal study of two-year college students’ enrollment and persistence, with a focus on under-represented and non-traditional students in STEM fields. Prior to working in academia, Jayaram received her master's degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, and worked at The White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a Presidential Management Fellow.
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.