ABSTRACT
The emergence and rapid spread of COVID-19 changed the face of education. At Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech), planning for the Fall 2020 semester started well before the end of the 2019-20 academic year. For the Fall 2020 semester, faculty at our university had the option to teach in various modalities according to what fit their personal and course needs. The options included online (asynchronous materials completed with time and place flexibility), remote (synchronous, scheduled meetings that students can attend virtually), or hybrid (classes that have face-to-face meeting times, but offer students opportunities to complete most activities virtually and/or remotely). Restrictions placed on class size with physical distancing measures limited the number of students who could attend a given class session face-to-face. In the first-year program at Michigan Tech, we value an active, collaborative learning environment;an environment that would be difficult to implement asynchronously. Despite the shift to a remote or hybrid modality, we wanted our first-year students to still experience an active, collaborative learning environment. In this paper, we focus on discussing the steps we took to maintain and/or improve the connection between students and the engagement with the course materials. A comparison of responses from surveys administered in the first-semester engineering course at Michigan Technological University indicates that students were at least as satisfied or more satisfied with the remote and hybrid versions in Fall 2020 than the traditional face-to-face version in Fall 2019. Specifically, a greater percentage of students enjoyed the course, felt engaged and valued, were more prepared for lessons and saw value in the course and the skills they learned in the course. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021