Abstract:

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced universities around the world to transition their face-to-face classrooms to online learning. We developed strategies in our engineering classes to migrate our teaching approaches to deal with this transition. In Spring 2020, there were a number of challenges that we had to overcome when transitioning our engineering courses to online format. We developed strategies to ensure a smooth transition. Using students’ feedback and educator’s evaluations, these strategies had to be revised and made more effective over the period of one year and a half. These strategies not only deal with learning and course delivery, but also student engagement and classroom management.

The online teaching strategies include:
- Lecture and laboratories are conducted via Zoom.
- Assessments are conducted electronically via Blackboard, the course management system adopted by our University.
- Students are engaged and given the opportunity to remotely participate in classroom discussion using the desktop/whiteboard sharing tools of Zoom.
- Instructor office hours are scheduled via Zoom at more flexible times.

At the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, classes resumed face-to-face teaching in Fall 2021. Having been absent from campus for several semesters, it was evident that a sudden return to pre-pandemic teaching style and classroom management principles would not be effective. Also, there was the expectation that a number of students and/or the educator may still need to be absent due to COVID. Our approach was to adopt the strategies we developed for online teaching during the pandemic and integrate them into the face-to-face teaching style.

This paper discusses our approach for adopting the strategies we developed for teaching and managing classes during the pandemic and tailoring them to post-pandemic education. We provide the rationale behind our approach and provide examples of the online teaching strategies that were adopted and adapted to post-pandemic face-to-face learning. The paper presents the specific strategies that we implemented in our sophomore level engineering programming course in Fall 2021 and further revised and implemented in Spring 2022 and Summer 2022. The paper presents the lessons learned after experiencing the return to post-pandemic face-to-face teaching over the period of three academic semesters.

Keywords:

Engineering education, Post-pandemic learning strategies, Classroom management.