Like many other universities across the United State, Penn State has moved the rest of our semester online. Ally and I have both started teleworking and today is week two of being remote. We wanted to share some project updates and how we’ll move forward without having any more face-to-face time this semester.

We feel lucky that by Spring Break, we had conducted 20 out of our 24 interviews. These interviews have been transcribed and as Ally talked about in her last post, we’ve created detailed maps to help us better understand (and remember) each student engagement journey. In addition, during the first part of this semester, Ally and I created our codebook and began to do some norming with a few interviews. This means that our transition to virtual has been pretty smooth. We’re meeting via Zoom on a regular basis and much of Ally’s work (coding) can be done independently and on a schedule that works best for her.

In addition to coding, we plan on doing some writing, compiling information on the maps for the Student Engagement Network, and creating a protocol for our last four interviews. I feel optimistic that we can get those final four interviews completed, we’ll just need to get creative about the map part. And, there’s a chance we might be interviewing a student whose engagement experience was cut short due to COVID-19. That would definitely give the map something unique and also plays well into “the cloud,” one of our guiding frameworks from Ella Kahu (2013). The one college we haven’t been able to get any interviewees is the College of Nursing and I feel that moving our interviews online might help us get two willing and available students. Stay tuned!