Efficacy of Online Training on Internet of Things (IoT) and Automation Through Industry and Institute Partnership During COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

COVID-19 forced all educational institutions to close down for the safety of students, educators, and community, and transformed the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching to a virtual mode of teaching and remote learning for the continuity of education. While this shift affected the overall process of traditional teaching, learning practices, and norms, many students made adjustments and managed to be engaged in the learning process and made progress towards gaining knowledge in this new modality. During the lockdown phase, a one week intensive training program was organized for students and young professionals with information technology (IT) backgrounds free of cost to provide them a hands-on orientation on Internet of Things (IoT) and Automation through an Industry and Institute Partnership. The resource persons i.e., teachers for the training were from premier technical institutions like the National Institute of Technology and Industry. A total of 262 participants completed the program. After the training program, 139 participants provided online feedback and shared their views about the experiences and effectiveness of the training. The objective of this article was to examine the participant perceptions of the effectiveness of the IoT and automation online training. About half of the participants were male (65.5%), below 25 years of age (74.1%), and studying at different levels including 10 Ph.D. scholars, and about four-fifths of them were current students of IT. Gaining knowledge was the main reason for 69.1% of participants while 18.7% attended the training with a notion that a training certificate will be beneficial for their career growth. More than half of them found the training to be very effective (53.2%) while 45.3% found it to be effective (χ² = 6.94, p < 0.05). About two-thirds (66.2%) of participants stated that all the resource persons were knowledgeable and experienced while 26.6% remarked that the majority of the resource persons were knowledgeable and experienced (χ² = 11.07, p < 0.01). Hands-on training and sessions on practical applications were the most interesting part of the training as revealed by thematic analysis of qualitative data. The results of this study indicate that the online mode of training was a good option for knowledge dissemination and even hands-on training during the COVID-19 lockdown as pointed out by 94.2% of participants reporting that they would like to attend a similar training in the future.