College of Engineering News Room

Staying Connected While Teaching from a Distance

By Brad Stager

When the state of Florida’s public health response to the COVID-19 global pandemic required closing the University of South Florida’s Tampa campus for spring and summer semesters, it created the need for the College of Engineering to teach students and conduct business almost entirely online. Maintaining administrative and academic functions meant overcoming challenges previously unknown by students, faculty and staff.

While there already exists sufficient digital bandwidth, as well as learning and business management systems for the college to operate in the cloud, high among the concerns of Dean Robert Bishop, Ph.D., is how well people would fare with everyone working off campus.

“There's lots of angst, anxiety surrounding the move to remote operations,” Bishop said. “They’re going to be at home, and they’re going to be in an environment they haven’t had to work from before.”

One way Bishop is maintaining a line of communication among college faculty and staff is with daily emails featuring an inspirational quote from luminaries such as scientist Charles Darwin and artist Paul Klee, as well as a link to an informative video that he records. Recipients contribute as well, sharing useful online teaching tips such as streaming office hours on YouTube, as well as pictures of their home work spaces and videos of their views to the outside world - many of them pastoral in nature. As elsewhere on the internet, pet pictures and videos are exceptionally popular.

“I’ve discovered that the College of Engineering has more pets than I could ever have imagined,” he said. "Everyone seems to have one dog, two dogs, a cat. That, I think is a wonderful thing.”

The videos Bishop produces are also available publicly on the USF College of Engineering YouTube channel under the title Operation: Engineering, How are you doing?. They may address general academic and administrative topics such as noteworthy college achievements or solutions staff and faculty have used to meet the challenges of operating remotely, but the videos and emails also help foster an online office culture that can provide some of the same benefits as doing business in person.

“My motivation is to keep the college connected to each other on a human level,” Bishop said. “It’s not about policy issues; it’s not about IT issues; it’s about, ‘what does your workspace look like?,’ ‘what does it look like outside your window?,’ ‘what’s your favorite piece of art?,’ ‘what kind of music do you listen to?’”

People are also using the opportunity to share artwork they have produced or their musical performances, whether as a solo artist or as part of a larger ensemble, like the Fanfare Concert Winds, an Ybor City-based community concert band which includes musicians from the college among its dozens of wind instrumentalists. Learning how to use online meeting tools for instructional purposes has resulted in invitations to hang out online between colleagues. 

“A lot of people think engineers are not social animals," Bishop said. “That’s not true - we are very much social animals and very creative and we like art and music. We like each other, and we like to be with people.”  

When classes and daily work routines return to USF’s Tampa campus, Bishop plans to mark the occasion with a face-to-face social event featuring a presentation of the visual imagery produced and shared by the College’s faculty and staff during the time they were physically separated, but came together like never before.

“My hope is that a positive outcome of this COVID-19 crisis is that the college will be closer together on the human side than prior,” he said. “We’ll know more about each other, and we’ll have a better sense of who we are as people. You don’t often get a chance to do that in an office setting.”

Beyond the current situation with COVID-19, Bishop says the lessons learned from operating remotely will be helpful in the future, whether dealing with another disruptive emergency situation or in terms of changes in delivering instruction. One of the concerns he cited is how student-instructor relationships will fare.

“I know the faculty miss the students, and students miss the faculty," he said. "I don’t want to lose that connection.”

That concern may be reflected in a poll of college students conducted by College Reaction/Axios April 10-12. When asked about distance learning, 77% responded with “distance learning is worse or much worse than in-person classes.” Some respondents, 13%, said they would take time off from college if distance learning continues into next year.

Departments are Handling the Conversion

Faculty members like Civil and Environmental Engineering Chair Manjriker Gunaratne, Ph.D., are finding out firsthand how students are reacting to remote instruction.

“The students want interaction on a personal basis, and based on what instructors have told me and what students have told me, most students want the one-to-one contact,” Gunaratne said.

He added that class discussions are not easily facilitated online and that exam validity and security are also concerns. Lab work, especially in a hands-on field like civil and environmental engineering is hard to duplicate online.

“Students have to take part to some extent at least in doing the experiment,” Gunaratne said. “Besides getting the readings, they have to know where the readings are coming from, how the computer spits them out, how to get the computer to get them out and then write the report.”

Gunaratne's department is creating videos of lab experiments and providing students data to analyze.

The concerns about the effect of online instruction on student success is shared by Sudeep Sarkar, Ph.D., who is chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He says the need for classroom teaching with live interaction between teachers and students still exists, even as the learning environment goes through changes. 

“Most students are not self-learners, and many require the rhythm of weekly contact to make continuous progress," Sarkar said. "However, access to online learning materials, along with classroom-based teaching, could enhance student learning.”

Sarkar's department was able to build upon its existing online presence and to make its more than 100 course sections available to about 2,200 students. 

“Two of our undergraduate programs, ones in information technology and cybersecurity, are already partially online, and our master’s information technology program is a 10th ranked (US News) online program," he said. "So, we had faculty experience in the department to draw upon.”

Medical Engineering is the college’s newest department, but department chair Robert Frisina, Ph.D., said it was able to transition to remote instruction with minimal disruption.

“Our department was very well prepared, and some of us were already quite familiar with on-line and remote delivery tools," Frisina said. "Those of us 'in-the-know' helped as needed.”

He added that there are future opportunities that can arise from today’s challenges. 

“I can see mixing more remote learning, flipped classroom, hybrid elements into our traditional instructional delivery modes to make our existing courses even better and more successful,” he said.

Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Rajiv Dubey, Ph.D., said having the USF campus close well after the spring semester began worked to the advantage of mechanical engineering students.

“They were pretty far along in their courses - that helped," Dubey said. "There was a lot of anxiety in the beginning, but it’s much better than I anticipated.”

Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Chair Clifford Henderson, Ph.D., said his department focused on turning class material into online content that can be used now and possibly in the future.

“It was a very rapid transition, and I was very impressed with how our faculty faced the challenge with very few hiccups," Henderson said. "There will be aspects of this that will continue to be utilized.” 

The trend of increased remote instruction is one that Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Chair Tapas Das, Ph.D., anticipates as well.

“We like our face-to-face classes,” Das said. “But it is expected when we all settle down we’ll have more remote delivery of classes.” 

Public health emergencies are not new to the human experience. They have occurred throughout recorded history, such as the Plague of Athens - an epidemic that occurred in the Greek city-state between 426-430 B.C. Electrical Engineering Chair Chris Ferekides, Ph.D., offers a perspective from that era that has applications today.

“As difficult, scary, and sad this situation is, I believe that there will be some good to come out of this, and it may have to do with us as humans beings, and/or our instructional methods etc.;  the ancient Greeks used to say:  Ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού : Literally 'nothing bad happens without some good'  … which I think is true,” Ferekides said.