COVID-19 Pandemic Challenges for Engineering Education

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all the spheres human activities. The problems related with the forced self-isolation of people, closed borders between the countries as well as within the states push towards digitalization opening opportunities for bringing new technologies into everyday life. The paper focuses on the resulting dramatic changes in engineering education due to the current classical learning process paradigm shift. The brief overview of the problems is presented. The main challenge is to teach the future engineers to work with and to operate real hardware not available at home. The implementation of a Digital Twin concept for industrial equipment can partially solve the emerged problem related with hardware unavailability by the remote learning process as well as to improve the professional training quality as the pandemic is over.