Events - Engineering Rising to the Challenge - College of Engineering - Purdue University

The 2020 pandemic has challenged our healthcare systems but it has also opened the door to a greater acceptance of robots and automation. What will the future of robotics and healthcare look like?

Distance education began with correspondence courses in the late 1800s and has grown in importance with the rise of new communication technologies. Widespread access to the internet has removed many, if not most, of the technical barriers to distance education. Enthusiasm soared with the creation of Coursera and MITx (now edX), but the radical transformation of higher education that was predicted gave way to a slower evolution. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a shot of adrenaline for online university education. Purdue Engineering has a long history in distance education; through nanoHUB.org it was an early leader in open courseware and free online courses for nanotechnology. Currently ranked No. 3 in online education, Purdue Engineering continues to innovate with competitively priced online master’s degrees.

As we look to the future, we ask: What will the post-pandemic educational landscape look like? Specific questions include: 1) Will there be a return to residential education? 2) Will there be a much larger role for online education? 3) How will online education change residential education? 4) How do students learn differently online and in the classroom? and 5) How can online education promote diversity and inclusion? These are some of the questions that we will be exploring with a distinguished panel of experts with perspectives from academia and industry.

Moderator: Darcy Bullock, Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering, Co-Chair of the Purdue Engineering Initiative in Autonomous and Connected Systems, and Director of the Joint Transportation Research Program at Purdue University

Panel: Greg Shaver, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Neera Jain, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Pam Fisher, INDOT; and Steve Boyd, CEO of Peloton Industries.