Enrichment and improvement of e-learning with interactive teaching using practical activities and software capabilities

Since the Corona pandemic, universities have widely used e-learning for engineering education. Although the e-learning method has practical challenges, some approaches can enrich this method and increase the attractiveness of the teaching by employing activity-based learning. In this article, examples of such approaches for the improvement of e-learning are addressed. The first method is to teach the engineering concepts with the help of proper experiments, which is easier to implement in e-learning than traditional teaching. The second approach is to enrich the learning by motivating students to carry out practical experiments at home while the students are provided with the elements needed for these activities. Another important approach is employing active links to implement activity-based learning and interactive teaching. This article also presents the results of some surveys conducted on the above approaches and the evaluations obtained from students in such courses in order to confirm the effectiveness of these strategies. Finally, the teaching approaches of different universities in the important course “Introduction to Electrical Engineering” are reviewed and compared with the methodology of the University of Tehran to indicate the employment of the proposed approaches in other universities.