2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When the pandemic hit, we were all faced with making many immediate changes and adjustments in terms of how we dealt with educating our students. At that time, we quickly moved to an online format, and this certainly posed many challenges for educators and students alike. These challenges involved more than just a change in the physical landscape of how we crafted the learning experience for our students. We also had to adjust how we assessed student learning; and, oftentimes this felt like we were doing it while trying to hit a moving target. As we reflect on these teaching and learning experiences during the pandemic, it is important and timely to pause and reflect on how these experiences may impact our classrooms going forward. In fact, some of these experiences may actually have produced encouraging outcomes and if so, we need to take the time to assess and evaluate how to translate them back into the learning environment of our classrooms going forward. One may even be able to argue that the online experience had a positive impact on learners that, for one reason or another, were not comfortable interacting in an in-person classroom. For these students, we might say that the online experience gave them a front-row seat and perhaps allowed them to engage more comfortably. For other students, the exact opposite might be the case. Additionally, with online learning there were also new issues with work-life balance for both educators and students. Sometimes this actually assisted the work-life balance in terms of offering more flexibility as well as more modalities for teaching and learning. Ultimately, we need to pause and ask ourselves how we measure the successes and failures in terms of both teaching and learning that occurred during the pandemic. This paper aims to provide some examples of these successes and failures as a catalyst for moving forward in the post-pandemic higher education landscape. More importantly, this paper will bring to light the challenges experienced in the online learning environment during the pandemic. With a focus on two introductory physics courses offered at American University both during and after the pandemic, this paper will address how the challenges experienced during the pandemic have now created new teaching and learning challenges as we have returned to in-person classes. We address these challenges by sharing some of the changes and modifications made to the teaching strategies designed to help alleviate them. By addressing these modifications and through a synthesis of these teaching and learning experiences, the goal of this paper is to showcase some of the pedagogical lessons learned and to provide suggestions and ideas in terms of how to incorporate them into our classrooms going forward in the post-pandemic era.