Speaking about the spring semester, Kirkham said, “The pandemic has allowed me to take a vulnerable approach with students that I’ve been told is appreciated. To some extent we are all riding waves of good days and bad days, but the grief around the amount of loss the pandemic has caused both personally and professionally needs to be regularly acknowledged and normalized. Since moving to remote learning, I start every class with a five-minute ‘How is everyone actually doing,’ and I end every class by promising to stay online for anyone who just needs to talk. I believe the students appreciate this, and honestly I do as well.”

Dellan Raish, who graduated in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in architectural studies and is currently a student in the master’s degree program, said the special guests were one of his favorite aspects of the ASU Sync learning experience. For the final-review Zoom call in his studio with Marc Neveu, director of the architecture program in The Design School, “the students were able to receive valuable critiques from reviewers all over the world, which would not have been possible outside of Zoom. Another benefit was the ability to record the meeting and watch back your presentation and all the comments you received. This helps tune your project and presentation skills for future reviews.”

“A good architect can frame problems in new ways: How does this work? How can I fix it? Our job isn’t just to tell people about architecture, but it’s really about a way of thinking. I think the spring semester was a way of bracing ourselves, but there’s a silver lining in this. After the pandemic, the architecture program voted unanimously to go forward with a professional online program. Before that, we were talking about how we could teach history or software online — but not studio.”

Dennita Sewell, who leads the School of Art’s fashion program, remembers sitting in her office with several other faculty members in March, just after receiving the news that classes were going remote almost immediately.

“We looked at each other and were like, ‘Oh boy, what are we going to do?’” Sewell said.

And then the group buckled down. They stayed in Sewell’s office for hours planning alternative assignments for the rest of the spring semester. For one of the fundamental fashion classes, for example, which involved the construction of an iconic white shirt, the group determined that students would instead deconstruct a white shirt of their own, at home.

Like Raish in The Design School, Sewell said that “doing things online allowed industry professionals to drop in (on classes)” and interact with students.

Melissa Button, a lecturer in painting and drawing in the School of Art, noted that her students had developed new ways of finding community online in the face of the pandemic, and that the relationships they were building with each other were often “richer and deeper” as a result.

A brand new course in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering called “Designing the Illusion of Reality” was listed as in-person for spring 2020, but by the time the class began March 30, it had, like so much else around the country, moved online.

Screen shots (in order of appearance): Dean Tepper at a Herberger Institute faculty and staff meeting; Film, Dance and Theatre students exploring different stage lighting options via Zoom; scene from a gaming class in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering; and faculty associate Dennis Bonilla appearing as a red panda to students in a virtual class room.