Lessons Learned: How Our Agile Department Survived the COVID-19 Pivot

This lessons learned paper describes a case study of the Spring 2020 semester when our university pivoted to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and how our department and faculty not only survived, but thrived, during the global pandemic. As the crisis unfolded and the university going completely remote was considered, our department responded swiftly to anticipate and mitigate the logistical, pedagogical, and psychosocial issues that ERT and the pandemic brought both for students and faculty. In this paper, we describe the actions our small engineering department took to weather the abrupt transition to ERT in contrast to our university administration's initial struggle to respond to the pandemic. We formed a cohesive community of practice by creating online networks for social and professional connection, we coordinated our student-facing efforts to minimize students' cognitive and technology overload, and we worked together to develop innovative ways to continue to incorporate active learning in our online classrooms. To show care and empathy, we regularly collected student reflections, asked students how they were doing during out-of-class interactions (e.g., advising and office hours), and examined our course evaluations. We found that students recognized and were grateful for our compassion during the pandemic and the efforts we put into maintaining a worthwhile learning experience for them. We would like to present this paper as a lightning talk.