COVID Impact on Higher Education Classrooms

The COVID-19 pandemic has created many problems in our society today from psychological, political, economic and educational standpoints, just to name a few. This is a generational event that we will look back on as creating "the new normal" for our society. In March of 2020, Purdue University transitioned from teaching students in a traditional face-to-face format to an online format. Over Spring Break of that year, faculty and staff worked tirelessly to create an online environment that served over 40,000 students in thousands of classes to complete the spring 2020 semester. The following semesters have led to additional changes as we have eased back into the classroom. In this paper we are going to focus on how this pandemic has influenced the classrooms over the last two years at our regional campus in Columbus. While we hope to get back to the way things were done in the classroom before the pandemic, some things are going to change permanently. The good news is, some of these changes are positive for our campus. We will take a look at what we think will be the permanent impact on our higher education classroom environments. In our presentation, we would also like to hear from you and learn what your thoughts are on how the teaching processes and techniques will be affected in the years to come. [For the full proceedings, see ED622414.]