ABSTRACT
With all the changes in the educational landscape due to COVID-19, capstone design courses have been uniquely affected. With several transitions to virtual course delivery and/or hybrid models of learning, capstone faculty are now challenged with helping students meet project objectives and deliverables, fostering student team cohesion, and managing sponsor expectations in virtual settings, all while fulfilling the course learning outcomes. While there have been countless programs, communities, and support systems implemented to guide the transition to online teaching, initially there was very little available to systematically understand and support the capstone and PBL community. The objectives of this work are twofold. The first aim is to outline the challenges faced by capstone faculty due to transitions to primarily remote capstone offerings, particularly within the areas of managing sponsorship, completing projects, and producing the associated final project deliverables. The second objective is to open a dialogue to chronicle concerns, gather input, and share best practices across the broader capstone community. The overarching goal is to help overcome -and even rise to- these challenges. This research was conducted by capstone faculty at four different universities. The first phase of this initiative involved research to identify the issues and practices in the existing literature, especially relevant to virtual capstone offerings. The second phase of this research involved a survey of capstone faculty on this topic to reinforce and/or supplement the literature findings as the virtual circumstances evolved. To understand the acute challenges, the survey noted above was conducted with the broader capstone community to include a diversity of faculty associated with capstone at a variety of institutions. This included capstone directors, coordinators, instructors, and advisors. The third phase gathered information through a panel organized and conducted by the authors at the most recent ASEE conference while dealing with societal and academic COVID-19 restrictions. The ASEE panel served as a platform to bring together the capstone community for ongoing dialogue, supplying additional solution recommendations. Results from this research coupled with literature findings indicated the commonality of challenges faced by capstone programs regardless of timing, engineering major, program profile, or type of institution. Among the survey results were the following: (1) Due to COVID-19 conditions, 44% of the respondents reported complete cancellation of this event while 56% reported conducting some form of virtual exposition. The work represented in this paper supports an intention to be agile enough to adapt to any situation along this continuum - and likewise be posed to adjust when our capstone programs must react to emerging circumstances in the future. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021