On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers

during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

Barbara Gallina

School of Innovation, Design and Engineering (IDT), Mälardalen University, Box 883, 72123 Västerås, Sweden

Keywords:

Pedagogical Digital Competence, Community of Inquiry (COI), Objectivism, Constructivism, Social

Constructivism, Constructive Alignment, Safety-critical Systems Engineering.

Abstract:

World-wide opportunities for “meetings of minds” was the goal of the research of visionaries who contributed

to the creation of networked communication systems. During 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,

educational institutes massively exploited these systems enabling virtual spaces of synchronous and asyn-

chronous meetings among students and among students and teachers. Technology alone, however, is not

sufﬁcient. Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge (TPACK) and competence are paramount.

In this paper, I report about my experience in pedagogically designing and implementing an on-line version

of an advanced master course on safety-critical systems engineering, conceived and delivered as a series of

Zoom-based, and Community-Of-Inquiry (COI)-oriented meetings plus Canvas-based threads of discussions

for educating the minds of future safety and software engineers. I also report about the limited but still talkative

COI-speciﬁc questionnaire-based evaluation, conducted with the purpose of better understanding the limits of

moving the course on line and elicit areas of improvement, given that likely education on-line is now here to

stay. Finally, I elaborate on a roadmap for future development, based on the results from the ﬁrst instance.

1 INTRODUCTION

Networked communication systems were conceived

by visionary researchers whose purpose was to create

world-wide opportunities for “meetings of minds”.

During 2020, as a reaction to the COVID-19 pan-

demic and the consequent urgent imperative to move

online and contribute to social distance, educational

institutes massively exploited these systems enabling

virtual spaces of synchronous and asynchronous dia-

logues among students and among students and teach-

ers. As known, however, technology alone is not

sufﬁcient. Knowledgeable and skilled personnel are

needed. At Mälardalen University, Sweden, differ-

ent initiatives have been introduced to support teach-

ers lacking experience with on-line education to nav-

igate in these challenging times. These initiatives

aim at enabling teachers to achieve skills spanning

from basic digital literacy, achievable via for in-

stance few-hour courses on digital learning platforms

and digital video-conferencing systems to pedagog-

ical digital competence, achievable via formal uni-

versity courses such as PEA929-Pedagogical digital

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6952-1053

competence (MDH-Mälardalen University, 2020e).

With the purpose of creating opportunities for “meet-

ings of minds” and acquiring the knowledge and skills

necessary for addressing the challenges posed by on-

line education, I took PEA929 while re-designing

for on-line delivery DVA437 Safety critical systems

engineering (MDH-Mälardalen University, 2020a),

an advanced master course. PEA929 allowed me

to achieve the necessary pedagogical digital compe-

tence, which then combined with my knowledge of

content, as well as understanding of the complex in-

teraction between the different types of knowledge

components allowed me to re-design DVA437 for on-

line delivery. In this paper, I report about my expe-

rience in pedagogically designing and implementing

the on-line version of DVA437, conceived and deliv-

ered as a series of Zoom-based, and Community-Of-

Inquiry (COI)-oriented meetings plus Canvas-based

threads of discussions for educating the minds of fu-

ture safety engineers. I also report about the limited

but still talkative COI-speciﬁc questionnaire-based

evaluation, conducted with the purpose of better un-

derstanding the limits of moving the course on line

and elicit areas of improvement, given that likely ed-

ucation on-line is now here to stay and not just a tem-

362

Gallina, B.

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report.

DOI: 10.5220/0010509903620369

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 2, pages 362-369

ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9

porary patch introduced to contribute to facing the

COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I elaborate a roadmap

for future development based on the results from the

ﬁrst instance. The rest of the paper is organised as

follows. In Section 2, I recall essential background

information. In Section 3, I explain the pedagogical

goal. In Section 4, coherently with the pedagogical

goal, I present the COI-oriented redesign and imple-

mentation of DVA437. In Section 5, I present the re-

sults. Finally, in Section 6, I draw my conclusions and

elaborate on a roadmap for future development.

2 BACKGROUND

In this section, I recall essential information about

the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

(TPACK) framework, and current models and learn-

ing perspectives for an effective pedagogically dig-

ital learning experience. I also recall essential in-

formation on the advanced master course on safety-

critical systems engineering, code DVA437, which I

re-designed for on-line delivery.

2.1 TPAC Knowledge and Competence

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

(TPACK) is a theoretical framework for understand-

ing teacher knowledge required for effective technol-

ogy integration. TPACK introduces the relationships

between all three basic components of knowledge

(technology, pedagogy, and content) (Mishra and

Koehler, 2006). At the intersection of these three

knowledge types is an intuitive understanding of their

complex interplay. Teachers are expected to teach

content using appropriate pedagogical methods and

technologies. Beside the knowledge, competence,

which “is a performance-related term describing a

preparedness to take action” (M. Søby, 2013), is

also fundamental. Speciﬁcally, in the context of

this paper, pedagogical digital competence is the

competence in focus. This competence is deﬁned

as the “teacher’s proﬁciency in using Information

Communication Technology (ICT) in a professional

context with good pedagogic-didactic judgment and

his or her awareness of its implications for learning

strategies and the digital Bildung of pupils and

students” (Krumsvik, 2011).

2.2 Community of Inquiry Model

The Community Of Inquiry (COI) model (Garrison

et al., 1999) is constituted of three core elements es-

sential to an educational transaction: cognitive pres-

ence, social presence, and teaching presence. The

COI model, illustrated in Figure 1, taken from (Garri-

son et al., 1999), assumes that learning occurs within

the community through the interaction of the three

core elements. Indicators (key words/phrases) for

each of the three elements emerged via the analysis of

computer-conferencing transcripts. These indicators

permit the effectiveness of the implementation of the

COI-model to be assessed. To make the paper self-

contained, the deﬁnitions of these types of presence

and the corresponding types of indicators are recalled

in what follows.

Figure 1: Community of Inquiry Model.

The cognitive presence is deﬁned as extent to which

learners are able to construct and conﬁrm meaning

through sustained reﬂection and discourse. Indicators

related to this type of presence are: sense of puzzle-

ment, information exchange, connecting ideas, apply

new ideas.

The social presence is deﬁned as the ability of par-

ticipants to identify with the community (e.g., course

of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting en-

vironment, and develop inter-personal relationships

by way of projecting their individual personalities. In-

dicators related to this type of presence are: emoti-

cons, risk-free expressions, encouraging collabora-

tion.

The teaching presence is deﬁned as facilitation,

and direction of cognitive and social processes for the

purpose of realising personally meaningful and edu-

cationally worthwhile learning outcomes. Indicators

related to this type of presence are: deﬁning and ini-

tiating discussion topics, sharing personal meaning,

focusing discussion. The interested reader may refer

to (Castellanos-Reyes, 2020) for a brief summary re-

garding the 20 years of progress in COI.

2.3 Learning Perspectives

In this subsection, I recall three perspectives on learn-

ing: the objectivistic, the constructivist and social

constructivist. According to the objectivist perspec-

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

363

tive on learning, According to the objectivist perspec-

tive on learning, learners are instructed by teachers.

Teachers are expected to transmit knowledge to the

learners. The main assumption is that knowledge

is objective, a single objective reality exists. This

perspective is recognised to be appropriate for sub-

ject matters based on factual technical or procedural

knowledge. However, it is pointed out that the learn-

ing experience might be impoverished when students

only act as passive recipients of content. According to

the constructivist perspective on learning, “learning

happens when learners construct meaning by inter-

preting information in the context of their own expe-

riences. In other words, learners construct their own

understandings of the world by reﬂecting on their ex-

periences” (Gogus, 2012). According to the social

constructivist perspective, the construction of knowl-

edge is shaped by the social and cultural context. The

learners come to construct and apply knowledge in

socially mediated contexts.

2.4 DVA437

DVA437-Safety critical systems engineering is a 7.5

ECTS advanced course which is part of various

Master’s programmes (MDH-Mälardalen University,

2020c; MDH-Mälardalen University, 2020d; MDH-

Mälardalen University, 2020b) at Mälardalen Univer-

sity. DVA437 was introduced for the ﬁrst time in the

fall semester of 2011 as 10-week course at a pace of

50%, i.e., a total student effort of around 20 hours per

week. Until 2019 (before the spreading of the corona

virus), it was delivered on campus via regular interac-

tive theoretical lectures and guest lectures, typically

given by industrial partners. The Intended Learning

Outcomes of the course are:

1. Apply fundamental methods for hazard analysis.

This ILO implicitly requires that students reach a

mastery in dependability terms and concepts.

2. Apply safety standards for development of safety-

critical systems. This ILO implicitly requires that

students reach an understanding of the typical

safety life-cycles and are able to describe speciﬁc

portions of them in speciﬁc domains.

3. Create a safety case. This ILO implicitly requires

that students reach a mastery in argumentation,

evidence identiﬁcation and classiﬁcation.

4. Compare and contrast his/her work with respect to

state of the art concerning safety case structuring.

These ILOs were formulated according to the SOLO

(Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome) tax-

onomy and the course has been designed accord-

ing to constructive alignment principles (Biggs and

Tang, 2007), combined with the education-oriented

ISO 26262 interpretation (Gallina, 2015), where ISO

26262 (ISO/TC 22/SC 32, 2018) is a standard for

functional safety in the automotive domain. The

course is advanced and as such it expects students to

reach in-depth knowledge and skills. The third ILO

“create a safety case” , for instance, explicitly states

the expectation for the so called “extended abstract”

level of understanding. Students are examined via a

written exam as well as project work which includes

an oral presentation, during which students are not

only expected to present orally their work but also act

as opponents/discussants while class-mates present.

The project work always proposes real life challenges

provided in cooperation with industrial partners.

3 PEDAGOGICAL GOAL

In this section, the pedagogical goal for the on-line

version of DVA437 is set. Speciﬁcally, based on the

theories presented in Section 2, intersecting the in-

tersections (Figure 2) is set as the main pedagogical

goal. This translates into ﬁrst striving for:

• a synergetic perspective on learning where all per-

spectives are considered of value and complement

each other. This means that partly the knowl-

edge is transferred from the teacher to the learn-

ers (especially factual knowledge such as the ter-

minological framework related to dependability),

partly is constructed individually (via individual

project-related assignments) and partly is con-

structed cooperatively (via group-based assign-

ments) via a social discourse;

• an educational experience where all types of pres-

ence are present;

and then striving for intersecting the intersections by

offering an educational experience where all types of

presence are present and a synergetic perspective on

learning is in place.

Figure 2: Perspective and presence intersection.

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364

4 COI-ORIENTED DVA437

In this section, I describe how globally the DVA437

course (Section 4.1) and how each single lecture (Sec-

tion 4.2) was redesigned and then implemented to

comply with the COI model. It shall be noted that

partly the redesign was inspired by (Fiock, 2020).

4.1 Course Redesign & Implementation

As mentioned in Section 2, DVA437 was designed

with constructive alignment principles in mind. That

design was preserved and made explicit for students

by drawing the corresponding mindmap, which not

only shows the alignment but also emphasises the

teacher and the student role with respect to the teach-

ing & cognitive presence. The mindmap, which was

included in the DVA437 study-guide, is given in the

Appendix. Regarding social presence, to motivate

students and create a community-feeling, I have pro-

vided examples of job-advertisement regarding posi-

tions for safety engineers where it was clearly stated

that the required skills were the same as the ones for-

mulated by the ﬁrst 3 ILOs. In addition, I have sent

a welcome message. I have prepared a rather de-

tailed study-guide, where I included a Zoom-related

“etiquette”, which among other aspects was recom-

mending students to add their photo, turn on their em-

bedded camera, use the chat to interact constructively

with the teacher and the other students.

4.2 Lecture Redesign &

Implementation

At lecture-level, each lecture was redesigned to ex-

plicitly structure the different types of presence and

learning perspectives. The initial and ﬁnal part of the

lectures are explicitly dedicated to the social construc-

tivist perspective and cognitive presence. The core

of the lecture is explicitly dedicated to the objectivis-

tic perspective and teaching presence. During which

however students are stimulated with questions and

1-3-minute exercises to allow them to act not only as

content recipients but also content processors. Fig-

ure 3 provides an example of a typical outline of

DVA437 lectures.

Each Zoom-based lecture was started in good time

(30 minutes earlier) to allow students to gather and

eventually interact as well as formulate their doubts.

Thus, each lecture was explicitly preceded by part

dedicated to the social presence. At the end of each

lecture students were challenged with exercises and

in various cases explicit discussion threads on Canvas

Figure 3: Typical outline of DVA437 lectures.

were opened to allow them to individually construct

knowledge.

5 RESULTS

In this section, I report about the quantitative results

based on the ﬁrst experience.

From a COI perspective, the teaching and cog-

nitive presence were present during the verbal inter-

action. A subset of students was deﬁnitively active

asking questions during the theoretical as well as the

practical lectures and guest lectures, participating to

the role-play constructively. The social presence in-

stead did not have speciﬁc contexts to be able to de-

velop itself. Concerning the assessment of the COI

model from a chat-perspective, I counted the typi-

cal COI indicators by inspecting manually the chats,

which were automatically saved by Zoom. Regard-

ing indicators of social presence, only one emoticon

from my side was included in the chat, no signiﬁcant

risk-free expressions, and regarding encouraging col-

laboration some indicators were present but mainly

included in my own messages sent to either individ-

ual students or to all attendees. Regarding cognitive

presence, I noticed that the number of indicators grad-

ually increased throughout the course-period. This

clearly highlights that it takes time to set the climate

for meaningful cognitive presence.

In addition to the analysis of the chats, given the

novelty of the course-delivery and the desire of as-

sessing at least partly the achievement of the pedagog-

ical goal, which was clearly set, as well as better un-

derstanding the advantages and limits of moving the

course on line, I have sent to students a COI-focused

questionnaire (Arbaugh et al., 2008), currently, down-

loadable from the COI-site (COI-Community of In-

quiry, 2020). As reviewed by (Stenbom, 2018),

this questionnaire has been used effectively to ex-

amine learning experiences and to compare different

premises in many contexts. Thus, I sent it to 16 reg-

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

365

ular students who: 1) took the course this year, 2)

attended the lectures, and 3) were active during the

project work. Figure 4-6 show the histograms related

to the three types of presence.

In addition to these histograms, even if not shown

in this paper, sub-scale scores were computed for each

respondent for each of the three scales as a mean value

of the numerically coded responses. For sake of clar-

ity, it shall be stated that the questionnaire was not

proposed as an anonymous questionnaire. The rea-

son for this choice is twofold: 1) “students should

be treated as adult partners and that an objective

and open exchange regarding the performance quality

must be possible”; 2) studies such as (Scherer et al.,

2013) point out that “no signiﬁcant differences are

identiﬁed in the informative quality of data between

the anonymous and personalised student evaluations”.

From a quantitative and throughput-focused per-

spective, the throughput after the ﬁrst examination

in relation to the written exam, if compared with

the previous instance, decreased negligibly (this year,

72,22% passed the written exam, while 73% passed

the written exam last year). In relation to the project

work, instead, the throughput increased (this year,

89% passed the project after the ﬁrst examination,

while only 82,75% passed the previous year). From

these numeric results, it emerges that the throughput

did not suffer by having moved the teaching on-line.

As mentioned, my threefold purpose with this

questionnaire/results-analysis was to: assess the im-

plementation of the Community of Inquiry Model,

better understand the limits of moving the course on

line, and elicit areas of improvement given that likely

education on-line is now here to stay.

Based on the answers received (8 students pro-

vided their answers, i.e., 50%), the main lacking as-

pect resulted to be the social presence. From a teach-

ing and cognitive presence, the respondents were

globally satisﬁed. Concerning timely feedback, this

year, it was an exceptional situation due to the short

notice sick-leave of the course assistant. Given this

limited but stil talkative results, it emerges the need

of substantially enhancing the social presence. How-

ever, room for general improvement is present.

6 CONCLUSION AND ROADMAP

In this paper, I reported about my experience in

pedagogically redesigning and implementing an on-

line version of an advanced master course on safety-

critical systems engineering, conceived and deliv-

ered as a series of Zoom-based, and community-of-

inquiry-oriented meetings plus Canvas-based threads

of discussions for educating the minds of future safety

and software engineers. Based on the results from the

ﬁrst instance, a roadmap for near-future development

can be sketched as follows. To improve the social

presence, I plan to:

• introduce a Zoom-based lecture-zero, during

which we could create a virtual round table and

present ourselves;

• use break-out rooms before and after the lectures

to create the virtual corridor facilitating small-

talks.

• open Canvas-discussion-forum for enabling stu-

dents to professionally present themselves in re-

lation to a set of assumed skills, which are helpful

for project work. This year a discussion forum

was opened but not in a structured manner and as

a consequence it was not exploited as expected.

To improve the cognitive presence as well as increase

contexts for social constructivist learning, I plan to:

• use break-out rooms to enable students to work

in small groups and solve the typical 2-3-minute

exercises;

• use polls to assess the individual cognitive pres-

ence;

To improve the teaching presence, I plan to:

• make explicit for the students the usage of tech-

nology in relation to a speciﬁc learning perspec-

tive and type of presence. This should allow me

to extend the COI-speciﬁc survey to get feedback

from students with respect to the effectiveness of

the usage of speciﬁc Zoom-or-Canvas features.

• introduce an exit-questionnaire for each lec-

ture to understand if the questions/challenges

asked/posed within the lecture can be an-

swered/faced by the individual students.

As future development, inspired by (Zhu et al., 2019),

I also plan to explore Computer-Mediated Discourse

Analysis (CMDA) for analysing the participation in

online discussion and students’ learning behaviours in

relation to CoI presences. A more formal evaluation is

expected to be addressed, implemented, and analysed

based on data collected over a longer period, com-

prising multiple DVA437-course instances, possibly

based on a larger sample of questionnaire responses.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the MDH students who took DVA437

(instance 2020-2021) and MDH colleagues for inter-

esting discussions on pedagogical digital competence,

during PEA929 classes.

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Figure 4: Social presence.

Figure 5: Cognitive presence.

Figure 6: Teaching presence.

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367

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APPENDIX

Figure 7: DVA437 Mindmap showing the alignment of ILOs, teaching/learning/examination tasks.

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

369