Lessons Learned and a Better Normal

As I write this, WPI is preparing to welcome students back to campus for the start of another academic year. Assuming positive trends continue, the fall of 2021 will look a lot more like the fall of 2019 than that of 2020. One year ago, a host of safety requirements (mask wearing, social distancing) and strict protocols (regular COVID testing, limits on social interaction) formed an uneasy backdrop to campus life. As we strove to keep the campus open, keep our community together and safe, and keep the university on a firm financial footing, we endured a roller coaster ride of rising and receding COVID-19 cases and fluctuating alert levels.

Thankfully, the beginning of 2021 brought highly effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines—created in record time, a triumph for science. Of course, the global health emergency is not over and the need for monitoring and vigilance will be with us for some time to come. Still, the new academic year will see the relaxation or elimination of many of our health and safety restrictions and the restoration of such hallmarks of the WPI experience as bustling classrooms, active clubs and activities, and a full slate of athletic competitions.

In my communications to the WPI community I have said that our hope is to get back to normal, though in many ways it will be a different normal—indeed, a better normal. The experience of navigating a pandemic has taught us some important lessons that we can carry forward into the post-pandemic world.

How might WPI be different post-COVID? One change is already coming into focus, and that is how we work at this university. After the majority of employees were asked to work from home beginning in March 2020, we learned how to stay productive without setting foot in an office—attending virtual meetings and events and using email, texts, phone calls, and productivity apps to collaborate. Working from home can be challenging, particularly for parents of young children, but it also provides a degree of flexibility that many employees welcomed.

This experience accelerated our creative thinking about work arrangements. Accordingly, going forward employees and their supervisors may negotiate flexible schedules and remote working arrangements, as long as those arrangements do not hinder our ability to meet the needs of our students. Not every job will qualify, but we plan to support employees who can do their jobs remotely and flexibly.

Employees are not the only ones who appreciate flexibility; students do, too. The pandemic has served to accelerate existing trends in education, particularly in the ways students want to consume their education and the modes of learning they prefer. Early in the pandemic we were forced to switch abruptly to all-remote teaching. This necessity served as a crash course in online learning for many of our faculty members. And since necessity is the mother of invention, it was also a spur to a remarkable burst of innovation that showed that things we once thought impossible to do remotely, including some science and engineering lab work, can in fact be done from a distance.

We will likely continue to offer students some flexible options and to use technology in creative ways to enable them to engage in their education in ways that fit their learning styles. A good example of this is lecture capture, where professors record their lectures so students can go back and review them at their convenience. That was already happening at WPI, but I think we will see it become much more common.

I also think we will see more online options for undergraduates. That certainly will not become the dominant mode of undergraduate education here, nor would most of our students want to study remotely. But we need to be responsive to the ways our students are comfortable learning, while also doubling down on what WPI does best: student-facing, in-person, hands-on learning.

While we were able to bring students back to the classroom in 2020–21, our renowned Global Projects Program (GPP) remained grounded due to the ongoing restrictions on global travel. As with coursework, creativity on the part of our faculty and students enabled our Interactive Qualifying Project and Major Qualifying Project teams to have valuable and satisfying project experiences remotely, including a number of teams that were still able to work with global partners. It will be interesting to see how this experience might be integrated into the GPP in the longer term. Still, the embedded, in-country experience we offer students through the GPP is an invaluable learning opportunity, one I don’t think we will ever get away from.

While we explore new options for current students, we will also ramp up our efforts to stay connected with our learners throughout their careers. The world and the workforce are changing rapidly, and STEM skills have always been the most perishable—a trend that will only accelerate. We need to continue to find ways to build long-term relationships with our students. During the pandemic, we began offering our alumni significant discounts on graduate education from individual courses to full degree programs, delivered in-person or online. In the future, we should see further efforts, including certificate programs, short courses, and just-in-time learning, to help alumni renew aging skills and become more valuable in the workforce.

Becoming more comfortable in the virtual world has benefits beyond education, as we’ve learned over the past 18 months. I held monthly town halls to share the latest information with employees during the pandemic—these routinely drew up to 600 attendees, more than would attend in-person town halls in the past; and hundreds of students and parents joined virtual town halls we held for them. Virtual gatherings with alumni drew attendees from across the country, something that would never have been possible before. Technology can help us build deeper connections; we just need to build that into our thinking and planning.

As we look to the future, the experiences of the past 18 months will figure prominently, in many ways, in WPI’s thinking and planning. With all of the sacrifice, stress, and challenge the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the university and its people, it would be a shame if we did not take from it some wisdom. At WPI, we have always learned from experience. In our more than a century and half we have never come face-to-face with an experience like one we have just endured. I think WPI will be a better and wiser place because of it.