Crisis teaching in 2020 has improved our next decade in the classroom.                                  

In March 2020, when we all went online due to the pandemic, we had to rethink our teaching strategies, goals and so many other factors. We would not want to call it online teaching or learning. Instead, we prefer to say it was “Crisis teaching”. We were in a crisis mode of teaching and just trying to get by. However, this crisis teaching taught us many lessons which has improved our next decade in the classroom. Four examples of what we did pre-2020, during the crisis and how it changed us for the better are explained in this paper. This paper includes student insights and faculty observations as well for the four examples:

1. Physical ability vs mental agility: New Labs format developed in online learning show how to better utilize future lab time.
2. Origami and other new tools: New Labs were developed to demonstrate new structural engineering ideas. 
3. Lab in a box – Sent the students materials that they used while instruction was given via zoom.
4. Teaching old dogs new tricks – Fully embracing the idea that the use of videos is an effective learning tool for repetition, rather than reading and re-reading