Were we ready to teach during societal crisis? Lessons learned from a practice-based design engineering course

In March 2020, the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak forced the Dutch Government to close the schools at all levels to fight the spread of the virus. Immediately, education at the University of Twente was suspended, and all on-campus teaching had to be transferred to online platforms. It soon became apparent that conducting an online assessment, especially in practice-based courses, was challenging. This paper reports the challenges that were faced in the online student assessment of one of those courses. The topic of this paper is a third-year Industrial Design Engineering bachelor’s course that employs peer assessment to teach industrial design engineers (IDEr) the importance of user testing of physical products in the design process. Unfortunately, this type of assessment, which had initially been planned synchronous and in-class, had to be adapted to the ‘new normal’. While the test results showed that students could accomplish online peer assessment, the results of an online survey carried out with 24 students illustrate the multitude of challenges students faced. In the paper, I reflect on the lessons learned from the online peer assessment experience and provide suggestions for similar industrial design engineering courses of higher education.