This paper investigates the in-person and virtual format of delivery of the inquiry-based active learning modality, CBL. This study was conducted on students pursuing two different second year undergraduate engineering technology courses offered, “Biotechnology Concepts” and “Microbiology,” both of which were offered simultaneously during the winter semester of 2022. Both courses used a method that alternated between lecture-based teaching and case-based active learning. Each course comprised of 30 students, all of which took both courses concurrently.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of in-person classes at universities during the end of the Winter 2020 semester and hence, both courses were adapted to an online format. Soon after, during the Winter 2022 semester, the government-imposed restrictions were gradually lifted, resulting in universities to re-open and for the students to go back to the classrooms. This caused a shift from an online setting to an in-person classroom setting within the same semester, allowing students to distinctly compare between the two instructional formats.

Both courses acclimated to online learning supported by a real-time videoconference with the instructor, using the videotelephony software Zoom. Hence, both the lecture and active learning components of the course were performed using this platform. The classes operated similarly to how the in-person classes worked prior to the switch online, where the teaching was directed through lectures and the active learning components of the course was carried out in groups. Zoom served as an extremely beneficial platform for this purpose since it is capable of opening multiple videoconference rooms simultaneously, called “breakout” rooms. In these breakout rooms, students could communicate with their peers either through the chat option or by audio (microphone) and were also able to share their screens to facilitate collaborating. In addition, within the rooms, the students have access to the professor should they need assistance during the session. Likewise, the instructor was also able to enter the rooms to see how the students were doing during the session.

For the active learning sessions, the students were randomly assigned breakout rooms to form groups of three. The case studies were made available to the students through the university’s Learning Management System (LMS) at the beginning of the session. Once the session ended, the students were required to submit one copy of their solutions for grading.

The format of the in-person CBL was like the virtual format wherein groups of three students were formed to solve the case study. The case study was made available for the teams to access in LMS at the beginning of the active learning session. Similarly, the groups would then submit a copy of their solution for grading at the end of the class.

At the end of the semester, an anonymous survey using a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree) was used to record the perceptions of students on the effects of CBL, and to compare between the virtual and in-person formats of case studies. The survey consisted of a total of 10 statements which the students were required to evaluate by selecting their level of agreement/disagreement on the statement, including an overall evaluation of CBL (Alani et al., 2022) . The statement topics revolved around whether CBL, both virtual and in-person, had a positive effect on the students’ personal skills (critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, communication, and real-life technical skills), performance and self-confidence, learning experience, and course knowledge (concept understanding and application, and deeper understanding).

The switch from virtual to in-person learning occurred after having performed a total of 3 case studies virtually during the beginning of the semester, resulting in completing the remaining 7 case studies in-person. Both courses, Biotechnology Concepts and Microbiology included weekly case studies, except for the first and last weeks of the term, forming a total of 10 case studies for each course. The topic of the case study was associated with the topic being taught in the course at that week. For example, in the course Biotechnology Concepts, the case called “Jute gene tweak boost yields and fiber quality” was studied, which was derived from the topic of Recombinant DNA Technology. For the Microbiology course, an example of a case study for the topic of epidemiology was investigated, called “Patient Zero: The Origins, Risks, and Prevention of Emerging Diseases.”

Critical thinking and problem-solving were the two parameters categorized under higher-order thinking skills which provided similar results for both courses. As illustrated in Figure 1 and Figure 2 , most of the students agreed or strongly agreed that in-person CBL helped improve their critical thinking (Biotechnology Concepts (BC): 75%, Microbiology (M): 88%) and problem-solving (BC: 92%, M: 81%). Similarly, most of the students also agreed or strongly agreed that virtual CBL helped enhance their critical thinking (BC: 60%, M: 50%) and problem-solving skills (BC: 53%, M: 50%). These results abide with previous studies where it was demonstrated that CBL helped increase the students’ higher order thinking which includes critical thinking and problem-solving skills (Menezes et al., 2021, Li et al., 2019, Miri et al., 2007, Garcia et al., 2012) . From these results, it is evident that although the virtual CBL had a lower positive response compared to the in-person CBL format, the students still perceived that CBL did indeed helped their thinking skills.

Some reasons as to why virtual CBL had a lower positive response compared to in-person CBL has to do with the online environment itself, and how the students worked during the active learning session. In CBL, discussion and interaction within the team is crucial to evoke deeper conversations and instigate more brainstorming amongst the students about the case (Menezes et al., 2021, Garcia et al., 2012) . This is relevant as some studies found that technical difficulties were one of the challenges faced when implementing online learning, which could cause difficulties with communication (Song et al., 2004, Nicklen et al., 2016) .

During an active learning session, technical problems (e.g., choppy audio, disconnecting due to slow internet connection, etc.) are very interruptive to the discussions and could cause the students to discuss less or even end the discussion prematurely. Opposingly, for the case studies conducted in-person, these difficulties are not present and hence, it allows the students to have broader and more meaningful discussions pertaining to the topic on hand.

Another aspect that could influence the critical thinking and problem-solving skills of students in virtual CBL is that students tend to divide and assign the case questions to each member of the group rather than going through each question as a group. Hence, the group discussions are limited as each student could just complete their own questions without discussing. Besides, virtual CBL facilitates this since students can just divide and assign the questions, talk about the shared document and where to input their solutions, and completely mute themselves for the duration of the active learning session. This is indifferent to face-to-face CBL, where the students can see each other face-to-face and cohesively solve their questions. In addition, some teams in the face-to-face CBL answer the case questions one by one as a group, questioning their ideas and solutions with each other before finalizing their answers. Overall, these are some factors that can potentially contribute to the differences between the effects of virtual and in-person CBL on the students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

This leads to teamwork and communication skills, classified under interpersonal skills, both of which were also analyzed in this study. As demonstrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4 , most of the students agreed or strongly agreed that in-person CBL helped improve their teamwork (BC: 92%, M: 69%) and communication skills (BC: 92%, M: 69%). On the other hand, the responses from the virtual case studies varied with most students having a neutral perception on the effects of CBL for both skills (teamwork: 47%, communication: 53%) in the course Biotechnology Concepts, and for teamwork (50%) in the Microbiology course. Meanwhile, majority of the students disagreed or strongly disagreed (64%) for CBL having improved their communication skills in the Microbiology course.

These results illustrate that the students believed that in-person case studies helped improve their teamwork and communication skills, while virtual case studies had no effect or possibly even a negative effect on these skills. These results correspond to a study where it was found that face-to-face meetings aided in training the communication skills of students more compared to virtual discussions (Raupach et al., 2009) . Although a synchronous virtual environment mimics the face-to-face interactions, technical problems in online environments could cause difficulties in communication by hindering discussions which is an important component of CBL (Rodríguez et al., 2018, Song et al., 2004, Miri et al., 2007) . This is important as it is one of the possible reasons as to why students would be less inclined to participate which would in turn, affect the experience and the teamwork of the group. Moreover, for this study, the students were grouped randomly for the case of virtual CBL which is another challenge. Along with the addition of possible communication complications, the positive results were lower, and the students were not able to perceive the full extent of the intended benefits of CBL in the virtual mode. The in-person CBL, on the other hand, received positive results for both teamwork and communication skills in both courses which could be attributed to less communication difficulties. Furthermore, in face-to-face settings, the groups are usually formed depending on the seating, in other words, the people seated close to them which are usually peers they already know within the class. This makes it easier for the students to be comfortable to ask questions or voice their opinions within the group. Nonetheless, the students perceived CBL to have induced more positive effects to their communication and teamwork skills for the in-person CBL compared to the virtual CBL.

In addition to encouraging interactions and discussions within the class, CBL is known to help bridge the knowledge gap between class and real-life practice in the industry (Miri et al., 2007, Garcia et al., 2012) . Aside from the higher order thinking skills and the interpersonal skills, the effects of CBL on the real-life technical skills of students were also investigated. As seen in Figure 5 and Figure 6 , most students agreed or strongly agreed to the effects of in-person CBL on their real-life technical skills for both the Biotechnology Concepts (83%) and Microbiology (56%) course. Whereas for the virtual CBL, most of the students had neutral perceptions on the effects of CBL for both courses (BC: 47%, M: 43%). This signifies that the students agreed that in-person CBL positively affected their real-life technical skills, while virtual CBL had no effects. This difference could be due to the circumstances during the study since the virtual format was conducted at the beginning of the semester where most topics taught were introductory and were the foundations of the course. Whereas the in-person format, which was provided during the mid to the end time frame of the course, the students were already taught the basics and were already familiar

with how case studies were performed within the course. This is important since CBL was deemed more effective if students already possessed prior knowledge of the content and required recalling and applying it to solve the case (McLean, 2016, Menezes et al., 2021) . In other words, the students would have been able to use the knowledge they have to solve a real-life scenario and brainstorm their solutions with each other easier when retaining the background knowledge. These findings insinuate that further studies are required to better compare the effects of virtual or in-person CBL on the real-life technical skills of students.

The perception of students on the effects of case studies on their performance and self-confidence were other parameters examined in this study. The associated results are depicted in Figure 7 and Figure 8 . The results show that for both courses the students agreed or strongly agreed that in-person CBL had a positive effect on their performance (Biotechnology concepts: 83%, Microbiology: 94%) and their self-confidence (Biotechnology concepts: 83%, M: 63%). This adheres to a previous study with clinical nutritionist students where

in-person CBL helped improve their self-confidence in addition to their performance (Farha et al., 2021) . Another study conducted on undergraduate STEM students found that active learning helped enhance their performance (Freeman et al., 2014) . Similarly, nursing students also showed that CBL not only helped with the students’ critical thinking, but also helped with improving the students’ self-confidence and academic performance (Ma & Zhou, 2022) . On the other hand, for the virtual CBL, most of the students had a neutral viewpoint pertaining to the effects of CBL to their self-confidence (BC: 60%, M: 50%) and performance (BC: 53%) in both courses, except for in the course Microbiology where the majority agreed (64%). This indicates that the students perceive no effect of virtual CBL on their self-confidence and performance. As mentioned earlier, this might be due to the possible communication challenges in an online environment as these could affect the students’ learning gains, thus affecting their performance in the course. Additionally, a previous study reported that the overall performance of students was higher when case studies were performed in groups as opposed to being done individually, resulting in boosting the confidence of the student groups (Hautz et al., 2015) . This entails that teamwork has a significant impact on the self-confidence and performance of students. Potential reasons as to why students perceived no effect of the virtual CBL on the mentioned attributes could be associated with communication challenges and the formation of randomized student groups.

Learning experience is a very important aspect of CBL since it focuses on building an interactive and collaborative experiential student learning to meet the desired learning outcomes of the course. In the course Biotechnology Concepts ( Figure 9 ), the students provided strong positive feedback for the in-person case studies compared to the virtual CBL. 92% of students agreed (50% agreed and 42% strongly agreed) to the statement that “case study improved my learning experience” for the in-person case studies while for the virtual case studies, only 40% agreed (27% agreed and 13% strongly agreed). More than half of the students, i.e., 53%, had a neutral perception about the effects of virtual CBL on their learning experience, while 8% were neutral for the in-person format. No students disagreed with this statement for the in-person cases, while only 7% disagreed for the virtual cases. On the other hand, in the Microbiology course ( Figure 10 ), the majority agreed for both formats (virtual: 57%, in-person: 88%), some were neutral (virtual: 29%, in-person: 13%), while some disagreed (virtual: 14%, in-person: 0%). Thus, it could be inferred that the students had a more positive learning experience with in-person CBL compared to virtual CBL. In a previous study, it was found that students had a lower or worse learning experience in online environments compared to in-person (Nicklen et al., 2016; Dawson et al., 2021) . However, another study stated the opposite where the students’ learning experience were proved to have been better online (Chen et al., 2022) . These mixed results could be due to many different factors which include different disciplines, different methods of CBL implementation, different methods of online learning, etc. In addition, other parameters including teamwork and communication could either influence the students’ experience and satisfaction positively or negatively, which could result in creating a bias in the preference of students towards one mode of delivery. Essentially, these factors could eventually affect the overall learning gains and motivation for students as well.

This study also examines the effect of CBL on course knowledge with a specific emphasis on concept understanding and application, and deeper understanding. Figure 11 and Figure 12 illustrate that most students for both courses agreed that in-person CBL improved their concept understanding (Biotechnology Concepts: 100%, Microbiology: 94%) and deeper understanding (BC: 83%, M: 81%). The students agreed that the in-person cases helped them both in understanding and applying their knowledge and providing a deeper understanding of the topics. This is adherent with literature studies as CBL is an active learning method that has been used in different disciplines to connect the classroom to the industry through case studies (McLean, 2016) . Furthermore, it also helped in deeper learning, which means, going beyond the answers and encouraging broader thinking via classroom discussions.

For the virtual CBL, in the course Biotechnology Concepts, 47% of students agreed that CBL affected their course knowledge positively, 47% were neutral, and 7% disagreed; while in the Microbiology course, 64% agreed, 29% were neutral, and 7% disagreed. There were lower number of students that had a positive perception on the effects of CBL on course performance for the virtual CBL platform compared to the in-person CBL. Some factors that could have caused this difference are the topics of the course, and student experience during the active learning session. The course topics is one factor as the students had the virtual cases at the beginning of the term where the topics were mainly introductory and as discussed earlier, CBL is beneficial when students already know the topics. In addition, in a previous study, it was found that students had difficulties participating at the beginning, but improvements were done overtime, and the discussions and interactions eventually grew with time (Thibaut & Schroeder, 2022) . Hence, having the virtual CBL at the beginning of the semester might have also affected the perceptions of students on its effects compared to the in-person cases. Another factor is student experience, which refers to how their team interacted during the session, if they conducted discussions during the session with each other rather than splitting the work and working by themselves, or if there were problems encountered during the session. This would have affected the quality of the students’ interactions, while affecting their further understanding of the topic at the same time. Overall, the results demonstrate that while virtual CBL still had a positive effect on the students’ understanding, it was not at the same extent as the in-person CBL, since some students even perceived that it had no effect.

For the overall evaluation of students on the effects of the case studies, the results were analogous for both courses ( Figure 13 and Figure 14 ). In both courses the effects of in-person CBL was evaluated positively, with varying levels of agreement (Biotechnology Concepts: 42% agreed, 58% strongly agreed; Microbiology: 44% agreed, 56% strongly agreed), and zero disagreed or had a neutral viewpoint. The virtual case studies, however, consisted of differing opinions. In Biotechnology Concepts, most students had a neutral perception (47%), followed by those who agreed (40%), then disagreed (13%) while in Microbiology, the percentage of students who agreed (43%) and were neutral (43%) were the same, and a portion who disagreed (14%). With that said, the values were around the same range, with no huge differences observed for both courses, signifying a similar overall evaluation of virtual and in-person CBL.

From this overall evaluation, it is evident that students were highly in favour of the in-person case studies which had a full positive evaluation compared to the virtual case studies, which had conflicting results between a neutral and positive perception. The results show that students did indeed perceive a difference between the two CBL formats. In the literature, some studies found that there was no significant difference between the in-person and virtual CBL and that both methods were comparable (Donkin et al., 2022, Anas et al., 2022) . Some studies also found that online learning was preferred compared to the traditional face-to-face settings (Caroni & Nikoulina, 2021) ; while others found the opposite where in-person learning was preferred in other courses, disciplines and

universities (Alani & Grewal, 2024, Nicklen et al., 2016, Dalal et al., 2022) . However, instructors found many challenges to the online case study such as difficulty to keep track of the learner and answers to many case studies questions are already available on the internet (Herreid et al., 2021) . Many factors affect these results as mentioned previously. Further studies are needed to determine the effects of the format in which CBL should be delivered in the engineering technology discipline and effect on course outcomes. Nonetheless, whether the CBL format was in-person or virtual, it was quite well-received by the students during the semester and regardless of the format, case studies helped the students in their learning outcomes and experience in more ways than one.