Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic has forced students to learn about advanced scientific concepts, such as Fluid Mechanics and Modeling and Simulations, in a completely virtual setting. Such advanced concepts have traditionally been taught in face-to-face settings partially because these concepts require rigorous mathematical derivation and discussions. Pandemic has brought new challenges to educators to create engaging learning materials for students. The study indicates that students unconsciously absorb information that triggers motivation and endurance in students’ desire to pursue a lifelong research career. Pandemic however has brought new attention to technology development and created effective technology-driven solutions to learning needs for such concepts. Using the leading-edge technology, we have conducted extensive learning sessions for engineering undergraduate and graduate students for the last two years. In this paper, we will present a qualitative study aimed to understand the benefits of informal learning via advanced modeling and simulations seminar series. In this study, world-renowned STEM experts have given 45-minute seminar talks accompanied by 15-minute Q&A sessions to engineering graduate and undergraduate students, primarily from the University of Texas at El Paso. The seminar discussions, feedback, and comments were recorded using the Microsoft Teams video conferencing platform. We created this seminar series aimed to enhance and mitigate motivation losses faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal lies in bringing students closer to new ways of learning, enhancing their knowledge not only in traditional classroom settings but also to motivate students and convince leaders to create dual engineering partnership study programs among the United States’ top universities for diverse groups of students to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and inclusion among the United States higher education systems. This study indicates that students unconsciously absorb information that triggers motivation and endurance in students’ desire to pursue a lifelong research career.
