Global STEM education through e-service learning in the time of COVID-19 : a case study

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought about a lot of disruption, and education was one of the areas that was very significantly impacted. In many places in the world, students and teachers were forced to learn or teach online, oftentimes with very little preparation, in other places, schools shut down altogether and students' learning was interrupted. In this paper, we describe a case study that attempts to alleviate some of these challenges through an online STEM workshop series. Focus group studies were used to inform the design of the workshops, which were run as part of a service-learning program, incorporated student-directed, tangible learning, virtual experiential learning alongside theoretical content delivery to complement the formal curriculum. We present evaluation information as well as lessons learned for future similar endeavours.