Managing Hands-on Electrical and Computer Engineering Labs during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Experiences in managing hands-on laboratory activ-ities across five different Electrical and Computer Engineering courses or subjects in three different Australian universities during the COVID-19 pandemic are presented. With different financial, logistical and other resource constraints and lock down conditions in different state jurisdictions, a multitude of approaches were used which included: at-home labs with hardware kits posted by teaching coordinators or acquired directly from suppliers by students; remote tutor interactions; remote test-bed; remote and cloud-based assessments; and remotely accessed and manipulated lab equipment. This paper aims to share experience in maintaining hands-on learning objectives intact during mostly online teaching while providing lessons learnt and qualitative comparisons among different approaches utilised.