Lessons Learned as Lessons Were Learned: Teaching Engineering to a Minority Student Population Isolated by Geography but Crowded by Competition for Electronic Access (Experience)

As much as people would like to forget the circumstances related to changes forced upon education and particularly engineering education, due to steps taken to reduce the impact of the Corona virus pandemic, valuable lessons can be learned by careful consideration of the events in a particular context and the resulting outcomes. This paper will focus and comment on the operational variability introduced to a long-standing pre-engineering program aimed at a particular underrepresented population when things went haywire. The rather unique situation in this context is that the program had already been doing 10 years of distance-based education when the pandemic hit and courses flooded the airways. Interesting situations and unexpected consequences were experienced in the spring of 2020 as other learners were forcibly crowded into the same teaching mode with minimal preparation. Situations discussed will include items such as: student reaction to various instructor’s level of competency with the new media, operational constraints on physical access to the web, lifestyle chaos and impact on learning, the potential role of students helping students, etc. Data will be presented in the form of persistence rates in various courses prior to the spring of 2020 compared to the performance of students in those courses in that spring semester. The paper will include discussions of critical activities that may have influenced student reactions and outcomes. Impact on instructors and learning objectives will also be described and discussed. Suggestions for future strategies will be presented and described. In addition to scheduled semester courses, discussion will also include the impact of isolation and travel restrictions upon a two-week experiential pre-engineering preparation camp conducted on the mainstream State University in the collaboration. This camp had become a fixture of the program was positive anticipation from both participants and instructors. The impacts on planning, desired outcomes and the role of instructors and student mentors to the program will be described and potential impacts discussed. Potential impact to other groups of rural and minority will be discussed. (Some details omitted due to considerations of double-blind review.)