Abstract:

I have been teaching structural topics for more than 35 years. I am also a professional structural engineer who has spent more than 50 years designing bridges, buildings, and other structures. As a full-time professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston for more than 30 years, I have witnessed many calamities affecting students and faculty. None of those can come even close to the havoc that COVID-19 caused.

Just the school closure itself took both students and faculty by surprise.
Although everyone heard about COVID-19, the school closure created additional pressure on everyone.
Students felt it first primarily because they did not have any advanced warning, and the faculty felt it immediately after when they had to start teaching remotely practically overnight.

In my personal experience, teaching my students via Zoom was very educational for me. In my first class, I discussed my planned approach to presenting new material and assured my students that I would minimize interruptions due to technology use. I also asked my students to think of any (no matter how small) advantages of this new remote teaching mode. I tried a variety of approaches to calm everyone down. Eventually, I suggested having an open discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of classes on Zoom.

I usually teach in a lecture style with large groups of students (usually the whole junior class broken into three groups of 30 plus students each), so more than 90 students generated the input during our Zoom discussions. To find out how my students fared under these difficult conditions, I polled them to get "their side of the story." I found out from my students that they discovered many advantages of the new remote format.
And I also discovered my preferences and a vision of incorporating the technology used for the remote teaching format in my future face-to-face teaching.
It is much more difficult for schools to adjust quickly during the fast-changing times. At school, layers of administrators separate the decision-making executives from the faculty – students interactions. Therefore faculty individually developed their approaches to providing dearly needed additional support for their students.

At school, the new flexibility allowed to offer additional one-on-one meetings with students who needed help or had questions they did not feel comfortable asking in class. This extra help created a new opportunity to "level" the field for students who would have fallen behind during "normal" face-to-face lectures. This extra help and interactions, of course, required additional time spent by faculty in coaching students or providing individual tutoring.
Students immensely enjoyed this new "personal" approach allowing them to get answers to their questions much sooner than during "old normal" times when they needed to meet with faculty at fixed "office hours."

I believe our school should incorporate many of these additional services (and other schools can do this) into our new normal.
In my paper, I propose presenting many of the students' suggestions and opinions that greatly benefited them during the pandemic. These opportunities became possible because technology became widely available during the pandemic that did not exist before.

Keywords:

Teaching Structures, from face-to-face to remote learning, leadership, and management in uncertain times, students' participation.