Page 55 - Innovation Delaware 2021

MARK BRAINARD
STEVE NEWTON
in-person — faculty and administration alike were discovering that remote education has many advantages. Goldey- Beacom’s Young lists several: “We can digitally bring in prominent guest speakers from all around the world. We had some teachers with serious illnesses but who were able to continue to teach from home — which they couldn’t have done otherwise. And now, even with hybrid classes, if it snows, it’s easy to send a text message — ‘Hey, everybody, we’re on Zoom today.’” Additionally, non- resident students with day jobs no longer have to spend time commuting to and from class.
This spring, the University of Delaware began for the first time admitting a limited number of its students back on campus and into residence halls in a
ROBIN MORGAN
hybrid environment using — hopefully — social distancing as a prelude to full occupancy in fall 2021. However, most typical college social and interest-group activities remained online.
Still, the virtual activities have been designed to becoming increasing real. The Graduate College added a virtual social mixer to its weekly town hall meetings. The annual spring involvement fair went online. “UDance is always a big activity on campus that involves more than the students,” Morgan says. “This year, they say they are going to hold it virtually. I can’t wait to see that.”
The colleges and universities are quick to point out that the dark COVID cloud had many silver linings, especially in determining what worked so well that it will be part of the future after the pandemic has allowed everyone to return to campus.
“We plan to continue our faculty training institute,” Brainard says. “We don’t want that to go away.” He also says DTCC will continue offering students the virtual support system where they can choose to make many critical transactions in person or online. “Zoom has been awesome in helping to enhance student diversity programs,” Young says.
“We have made major strides forward in digital course delivery that are not just making us more efficient,” Newton says, “but actually changing the way we approach teaching — we are now more than ever moving from ‘How we teach’ to ‘How our students learn’ as a model.”
“Faculty found that some hybrid classes worked better than just in- person,” Morgan notes. “We’ll never go back to the way we did things in the last decade.”
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