Assessing the Impact of an Online Training Program on Research Performance of Students and Faculty Members

The short term training programs, in engineering institutes, are planned to provide a platform to the students, research scholars and faculty members to help them identify and formulate research problems in latest technical areas. The training programs, in face-toface or online mode, designed for specific fields of research need to be evaluated to assess whether or not such programs serve the intended purpose. This study examined the effectiveness of an online training program in terms of response of participants to engage in research activities in the field of application of evolutionary and swarm intelligence techniques to solve engineering optimization problems. A total of 643 students (37.3%) and faculty members (62.7%) from different technical institutes/universities in India with different engineering domains completed two one week training programs through online mode in the month of June 2020 and 301 (46.81%) were followed up through online mode to assess impact of these programs on improvement in the research work of participants. The results of the study indicate that more than 65.2% participants out of 290 successfully formulated and implemented at least one method of engineering optimization to solve the research problem in their area of interest within a period of just one month. Moreover, the study shows that 16.4 % participants have their research paper under review process while 18.4% participants have requested for another training program to improve their knowledge for better understanding of topics in the field of engineering optimization. The other findings suggest that the online training programs for students and faculty members were useful and the impact on students and research scholars was significant in improving knowledge and attitude to learn other methods of engineering optimization available in literature. The overall experience is that such online training programs can be more effective if designed with specific research problems and by encouraging participants to collaborate with other participants.