Senior capstone during COVID-19

This is the month of COVID-19.  Both University of Pittsburgh and Geneva College (our employers) announced that they would be delayed the week after spring break on March 11 (pushing back opening until March 20. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania declared that all educational institutions be closed on March 17.  Which also meant that our kids were not returning to school.

For looking ahead, I had told our senior capstone course during their midterm presentations on March 6 that COVID-19 was coming, and that they should expect it to be here before they returned from spring break.  Chatter among the Chinese community in the north hills of Pittsburgh was about when to pull the kids out of school, first in dread of the return of college students from spring break, then after that watching COVID-19 march toward us when it reached Cleveland. And we pulled our kids Friday March 13. That day, our school district announced that everyone should be prepared to not come back to school from the weekend, somewhat jumping the gun on the Commonwealth's announcement, but basically being correct.

All the schools (universities and kids schools) went on a one week pause while all of the teachers figured out how to convert their classes to online for the foreseeable future. For me, this first affected the Pitt Industrial Engineering Senior Capstone course, which had corporate sponsors.  Once Pitt announced the delay of school, I sent a message to all of the students:

As you have heard, the University of Pittsburgh is postponing the start of classes until Monday March 23.  The extra week is to give faculty a chance to make a plan to move to online delivery of classes.  While the university and school of engineering are working on setting policies and plans, I can offer the following:

1. Note that while the classes are suspended, society as a whole, including your clients, is moving forward. Please contact your sponsors and discuss working arrangements.

2. For team meetings, have a discussion on how to hold these as many students may not be on campus.  I recommend the use of collaboration software. For my own work, I am planning on using Microsoft Teams and I recommend it as one alternative. For those who do not know, MS Teams is a collaboration suite that comes with Microsoft 365 Online (those of you who use Outlook online or MS Office online with Box are using 365 Online)  Information is located at https://www.technology.pitt.edu/services/microsoft-teams It includes text chat as well as video chat, screen sharing, and whiteboard sharing.

3. After you have determined how your group will work, please contact your faculty mentor and discuss how you will continue to work with your mentor.  Note that faculty are still available to assist.

4. One major issue that was highlighted in the methodology presentation was how to work with the lack of data.  You are encouraged to discuss this with faculty (subject to your mentor).  In particular, the field of input modeling within simulation includes methods for working with limited data (I have discussed this with many projects, and the long term feedback from the clients is that the resulting models have been useful). In addition, many subject areas have standard methods of soliciting expert opinion.

5. For end of term activities, there will be meetings at the school of engineering this week and next to discuss how these will be modified.  I will inform you as they get made.

Specifically, was the need for a continuity of operations plan On March 16 I sent out:

 Reminder to all groups. 
 1. Please send me and your faculty mentor the report specified in 2 by the end of today. Also, let me know as much as you know about (3), (4), (6). 
 2. You should have your next meeting with your mentor scheduled. As per recommendations, this should be a virtual meeting. Make sure that you have a videoconference method that you have complete access to (i.e. no time limits) (Note: as Pitt provides you with an account MS Teams is such a method. The faculty should be getting enterprise Zoom accounts soon, but that requires the faculty be present in the meeting.) 
 3. Professional Note: What we are doing is called a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP). While not always done, there are many management recommendations that any organization have one that covers loss of key personnel, loss of access to facilities, and potential disasters. Ideally (but not always done) this is exercised on occasion. E.g. I volunteer with Red Cross for disaster response operations in western PA. Every now and then, we have an exercise where the staff are hands off, to confirm that the volunteers can manage a regional disaster response in it entirety without staff participation. 
 ---- 
 The Capstone program coordinators had a meeting this afternoon. 

1.  The Design EXPO is cancelled. 
2. Please inform your sponsors. 
3. I need a report from each of the teams by Monday to understand your status and resource needs. 
1. What is your plan on remote collaboration (again, I am recommending Microsoft Teams as a collaboration platform if you have not chosen one). Have you tested the collaboration platform? 
2. What is the status of team members (i.e. where are they geographically) 
3. For teams that are not substantially done (substantially done means you are running models and analyzing results), what needs are remaining? What is your plan on meeting those needs? 
1. If your needs are data related, you should anticipate the possibility of not being able to collect data. Do you have the expertise to work with minimal available data and generate appropriate probability distributions (Note: these are topics from probability and from simulation) Is your faculty mentor able to help you? If not, I (Luangkesorn) am the faculty with the most research and practical experience with knowing what can be done with limited to no data.
4.  Discuss with your sponsors your plan for ongoing collaboration. In particular, how the final presentation will be done. Note: Pitt has Microsoft Teams accounts for all of you (see previous message) and I recommend that as a presentation platform if they do not have one. 
5.  As the EXPO is cancelled, your company presentation (if recorded) will be your final presentation. You should have the presentation recorded and have your faculty mentor(s) and myself invited. Check with your sponsor if there are any security considerations. If you are not able to make a recording or invite the faculty to your company presentation (or if there is not a company presentation before finals week), we will have to make another arrangement (i.e. a presentation over Microsoft Teams) 
6. For all teams, check with your faculty on if there are any limitations on your reaching out to other faculty and getting assistance. You must do this. In the past, there are faculty who have gotten very angry about their team consulting with other faculty, even at the point where the team was fearful of project failure. You need to have an affirmative response that consulting other faculty is acceptable with no reservations. Do not wait until you need help to get this taken care of. My instructions from the department are to ask for permission to respond to your request from help, and to allow the team to fail if the answer is no. 
7. As I mentioned on the first day of class, during senior design, life happens. Back then, I was thinking of individual events, but this is clearly something much larger. Just as I said on the first day, be flexible and take care of each other. While I asked about geographic locations earlier, also check on everyone's physical and mental states. We are all human, and everyone's situation, especially those at home, is different. 
8. If you have questions or concerns, or even if you need a human contact, contact me.

Over the next few weeks, as classes were in turmoil from uncertainty, a number of students were sending me notes of thanks for providing structure for how to work with all the turmoil.  Many noted the slight irony that one of the most unstructured courses they had (capstones are supposed to be about the students taking on management roles and providing their own direction) suddenly became one of the most structured courses they had (my directives were to create a Continuity of Operations Plan, so they had a well defined task that gave the rest of their semester structure) while all of their other faculty were still figuring out what the rest of the semester was going to look like.