For their term projects this semester, the students in my Intro to Transportation class wrote blog posts summarizing the effects of COVID on various dimensions of transportation. I think they did a great job overall; here are links to the blog posts by topic area:
- Aviation
- Travel Behavior
- Highway Operations
- Public Transit
- Active Transportation
- Freight
- E-Commerce
- Modern Mobility Systems
I selected a blog post format for this assignment because I feel the students actually write too many technical reports as engineering majors. Not that these technical reports are unimportant, but a major role of engineers in modern society is to communicate with a less-technical or even a non-technical audience. And frankly, word processing documents are not the way most people read anything anymore. By writing in this more accessible and less formal medium, I hope the students can exercise these outreach muscles.
Also, I love the irony of the header image, which I pulled from the student post on highway operations. From a highway operations and safety persepective, slowing down is exactly what coronavirus did not do, but it probably should have.