April 24, 2020

As part of EETI’s NSF RAPID project to understand faculty, staff, and student experiences with the COVID-19 crisis and offer guidance moving forward, we developed and released our first interim brief to offer guidance to the College based on our first wave of data collection.

During the first 10 days of this project, we collected 23 stories from faculty, staff, and students across the College of Engineering.  The interim brief summarizes three key takeaways from these stories:

1. Faculty and staff are adapting well to the crisis – The majority of faculty and staff stories were positive in nature. They have largely risen to challenges of the crisis, celebrating creative solutions and small victories.

2. Students are struggling to reclaim their sense of agency – The majority of undergraduate student responses were negative and expressed feeling ill-prepared for the online transition. They’ve had little success in finding solutions to the new academic challenges they face.

3. Re-establishing a sense of connectedness is the greatest need right now – Social distancing caused participants to lose many of the social support and feedback structures crucial to the academic success. Undergraduate students in particular are suffering from this loss.

We include specific recommendations faculty, staff, and administration can employ these last two challenges. Some of these recommendations could be helpful as the Spring semester draws to a close. Others may be more appropriate to consider as we design online learning experiences and student support structures for the summer.

As of publishing this post, the collection of total submitted stories has nearly doubled. We aim to write another interim report in the coming weeks.

To view the interim report, click here.