The Remote Working Genie is Out of the Office Bottle

Although remote working has been adopted in some firms for many years, it has been largely marginalized in the sense that the mainstream of software engineering practice has involved groups of software professionals congregating on a daily basis in centralized offices. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working has rapidly become widespread. Companies and their employees have grappled with difficult adjustments during this transition, as might be expected in face of an international emergency. One suspects however that remote working will endure in some form in the post-emergency phase. Rather than merely coping as we do today, to be effective and sustainable, post-pandemic remote working will require a deep rethink of fundamental practice. This article provides some signposts to aid the journey from coping with remote work to thriving in remote working contexts. Author

Engineering in a pandemic: the impact of remote working and learning on quality of work produced

CONTEXT COVID-19 has shocked the globe since December 2019, with unprecedented international and domestic travel restrictions and self-isolation policies enacted by governments around the world. With lockdown policies in place in hopes of preventing further spread of this disease, there has been a widespread transition into learning and working from home - causing a paradigm shift in traditional working and learning cultures. PURPOSE OR GOAL This study aims to investigate the effects of transitioning into remote learning and working on the quality of work produced, specifically by electrical and electronic engineers in Australia. The objective is to identify factors relating to an individual's ability to produce self-defined quality work and identify any emerging themes due to the change in learning and working environments. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS A total of six participants, consisting of five students and one senior engineer, was recruited and interviewed. Each brought their own unique perspective on the matter via semi-structured interviews where they were asked questions regarding their learning/working experience before and during remote learning/working. Defining quality working through the epistemology of practice, cooperative work and self-efficacy, and connectivity, the researchers investigated how the ability to produce quality work has been affected due to the change in learning/working environment. OUTCOMES The representative data indicated that feedback, open collaboration, and team rapport were the three key contributing factors to quality work during this transition to learning/working remotely. Feedback and collaboration contributed positively to quality work and a strong team rapport further augmented the individual's ability to produce quality work. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This study provides an initial impression on the topic and invites further study to establish a deeper understanding behind the contributing factors towards quality work. Further studies into different engineering disciplines or a larger sample size to establish a larger data set is recommended to extract richer conclusions. Copyright © Tan, Marinelli, Male & Hassan, 2021.

Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy in Covid-19 Pandemic Times

New pocket-sized laboratories are proving to be an excellent tool as complementary equipment that students and lecturers can deploy to test control engineering design techniques. Here, the description and outcome results of an IFAC activity funded project entitled as Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy are presented. The project was executed in Portugal, from January 2021 to the end of June 2021, during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. The global aim of this project was to motivate preuniversity students to enroll in control engineering courses by showing and demonstrating that simple practical experiments may be easily accomplished using portable pocket-size laboratories. © 2022 The Authors.

'Socially Distanced Community Engagement' -Teaching GIS Site-Analysis during COVID

In the era of COVID, project-based classes that incorporate community engagement (i.e., interacting with both a physical site and members of the community) as part of their learning approach, have taken a significant blow. When connecting with people becomes an unhealthy practice, how can site-based learning remain embedded in engineering teaching and practice while accommodating virtual education instruction? Within civil and environmental engineering (CEE), GIS mapping has allowed students to step outside the classroom and engage with site-based work while focusing on spatial learning technologies. The open-ended processes of spatial data gathering can be used to draw students into community observation, inviting a focus on ecological and social interactions of infrastructure, site, community, and equity. However, in the era of COVID, the full range of site-based learning processes, including community engagement, are impossible to implement. This paper describes two amended processes for site-based learning through GIS data practices during the post-COVID shutdown period. Pre-COVID versions of the exercises asked student teams to explore a single site by observing and mapping infrastructure. This involved documenting community use of space and interacting with the local community to obtain multi-layered data on social equity, economic, and physical aspects of the site. However, two primary changes were made: in one class students were asked to explore their own local environment rather than travel to a shared site of focus. In the other, student teams collected only visual site-data foregoing the community engagement component. These students then connected electronically with community partners to gather social data. The study draws on data from student participation in two different classes: a large introductory class and a smaller advanced class. Data includes a qualitative analysis of exit interviews with a sub-set of both undergraduate and graduate student participants. This paper examines to what extent the site-based practices retain value given the limits imposed by social distancing, and whether these workarounds reveal unexpected strategies which might be applicable to future remote learning, and to community-based learning even when physical reconnection is allowed. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Disaster management in India's construction industry during the Covid-19 pandemic

A biological disaster such as Covid-19 is unique in that, unlike other natural disasters, it does not engage the civil engineering community directly. Gaps in managing the pandemic exposed the lack of an institutional memory of handling pandemics, plus a lack of risk perception of 'fat tail' events. The impact on the construction sector was significant across the world, but different sections of the sector were affected differently. This paper documents and analyses these issues and concludes with a case study of how small and medium engineering practices endured the pandemic. © 2022 ICE Publishing: All rights reserved.