New Modes of Teaching

In March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the campus to close and instruction to move online, a team of staff and faculty members set out to plan for what a WPI education might look like in the fall. With no way to predict the pandemic’s track or when it would be safe for people to gather again, the challenge was formidable.

Without a playbook to follow, the members of the Academic Program Delivery (APD) subcommittee of the Coronavirus Emergency Response Team (CERT) started writing their own. The team sifted through possible pandemic scenarios and evaluated the merits of 15 different higher-education delivery models. Team members monitored COVID-19 infection rates here and abroad, tracked state and federal guidance, looked at what other colleges and universities were doing, and consulted with WPI department heads, program directors, and faculty members.

They also coordinated with seven other CERT subcommittees doing similar planning in the areas of labs and research, facilities, services, student life, and events. On May 1, 2020, CERT held a Zoom meeting to update the faculty on its efforts. John McNeill, dean of engineering, who co-chaired CERT’s recovery and reopening group, devoted 20 minutes to the presentation, then spent the next hour and a half answering questions.

“There was so much uncertainty, and that naturally led to fear,” McNeill remembers. Faculty were concerned that students would be short-changed in an all-virtual environment, but they also worried about infecting themselves or their loved ones if they were to return to campus in the fall.

Their unease confirmed to McNeill that CERT’s job was as much about reassuring the WPI community as it was about devising a reopening plan for the fall. The path forward, he says, was through continued transparency and collaboration while providing faculty the tools they needed to feel confident in delivering the kind of education students demand—whether in-person, fully remote, or a combination of the two.

They had one summer to do that.

The university’s IT staff and the team at the Academic Technology Center (ATC) had made it possible for faculty to pivot successfully from in-person to remote teaching when the campus shut down in March. But adapting lessons for the full year would require a greater level of planning, expertise, and guidance.

The ATC, the Morgan Teaching and Learning Center, and Undergraduate Studies sprang into action, putting together a menu of intensive workshops and trainings in online teaching. Instructional designers queued up to help faculty build remote courses and IT staff was on hand for support.

Faculty responded to the offerings overwhelmingly; 75 percent completed an online pedagogy workshop before summer’s end and immediately put their training and ideas to the test, teaching 150 summer courses to 2,400 students. A typical summer session has 90 courses and an enrollment of 1,000.

“Faculty members took the opportunity to use the summer programs as a laboratory and a training ground, a place where they could experiment and learn,” says Art Heinricher, dean of undergraduate studies, who co-chaired the APD. “The faculty response was nothing short of phenomenal.”

In July, CERT unveiled its recommendations for the fall reopening. Graduate courses would be delivered fully online while undergraduate offerings would include in-person, online, and hybrid teaching and learning. The “TechFlex” approach called for shifting the academic calendar and reconfiguring classrooms and lecture halls to allow for social distancing during in-person learning. Students and faculty who felt unsafe on campus could choose fully remote instruction.

The APD team honed its reopening plan throughout the summer by surveying department heads every two weeks. They kept tabs on the number of faculty members who expected to return to campus in the fall and solicited feedback about measures that would ease concerns about infection and the quality of instruction.

Undergraduate Studies, in collaboration with the Morgan Center, kept the information flowing to students, faculty, and staff with weekly newsletters that shared tips and best practices for online learning. Katie Elmes, former director of expanded learning opportunities, made check-in calls to students and reached out to them in other ways, including through a weekly survey. Elmes shared student feedback with faculty and staff and passed along information about specific tools, ideas to fix things that weren’t working smoothly, and online teaching strategies that resonated with students, based on what they were sharing in the weekly survey.

“Everyone was managing such a heavy load, people didn’t necessarily have the time individually to do certain things,” Elmes says of the newsletter and other outreach efforts to students and faculty. “We could step in and act as a hub of information, helping ideas and feedback to flow between community members and offer that wraparound support.”

As the weeks passed, anxiety among faculty began to diminish and confidence in the reopening grew. McNeill attributed this to President Laurie Leshin’s leadership and Provost Winston (Wole) Soboyejo’s assurance to faculty that no one would be forced to teach in person, though everyone was expected to deliver the quality education students deserve.

The collaborative approach among CERT, faculty, staff, and students was another important factor in inspiring trust among members of the WPI community, McNeill says.

“WPI has always been a place where people are willing to help,” he says, “Our students have the spirit of teamwork and seeing our faculty and staff respond that way, too—that was really heartening. Whenever we on CERT asked someone to do something, their reaction was, ‘Where do you want me to grab hold and lift? How can I help? What do we need to do?’ People knew how important it was to give our students the best, and they were willing to help.”

By summer’s end, faculty were equipped with confidence both in the reopening plan and in their own ability to teach students in brand-new ways, whether that was from their homes or in reduced-capacity classrooms and lecture halls. A-Term saw the WPI education morph into a rich blend of in-person and virtual learning as guest experts dropped in on Zoom classes, lab work entered the realm of virtual reality, and robotics kits were mailed to students at home, among countless other innovations. Staff in offices across campus found new ways to support students regardless of where they were in the world through ideas like virtual study halls and peer mentoring programs.

“If anything amazed me,” Heinricher says, “it’s the range of ideas that came out of this, the creative problem-solving that happened very rapidly and on the fly.”

Now, with the 2020–21 academic year behind it, CERT is looking back on the lessons learned. One theme that emerged over the year and a half of social isolation is the importance of community. WPI faculty, staff, and students navigated an unprecedented crisis by relying on and supporting one another.

“I’ve always known academically, theoretically, that education is a fundamentally social activity,” Heinricher says. “COVID just drove that home over and over again.”