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

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 asynchronous 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.