 Okay, so we only have a couple of months to plan and implement how to put our study scores in the first-year Bachelor program online. Indeed, it's going to be quite a challenge, especially considering that these will be new students unfamiliar with TU Delft. There is a huge risk of them feeling disconnected and isolated without access to direct in-person help. I wonder what we can do to help them navigate this new situation. Kelvin, I know that look on your face. You're scheming up some new idea that is wonderful, but is going to take far too much time and effort. Remember, we only have two months to prepare for Kelvin. Why am I suddenly a cartoon? We are in a world of creativity and possibility now, and I have a brilliant idea. We always talk about education being a journey, but now it's a long and unfamiliar journey completed in relative isolation with its fair share of technical difficulties and with a destination that in many ways will be a first for students. Yes, I agree. You just highlighted all of the challenges we are faced with, but I don't see the brilliant idea yet. Why don't we turn that negative perspective into one of possibility? Why don't we aim that destination? Our students are on a journey to Mars, and as elite astronauts, they are ready for the challenges of isolation, prepared to troubleshoot and fix problems along the way, and willing to do what it takes to make it to their final destination. Remote learning is not an obstacle for them, it is in their blood. So how did we draw a parallel between an astronaut and a remote learning student? We chose to focus on four key challenges, namely the loss of time perception, isolation and loneliness, confronting unexpected issues, and overcoming boredom. Let's start with the first challenge. While in space, astronauts often experience a warped sense of time due to the loss of familiar terrestrial cues such as sunrises and sunsets. As a result, activities such as meals and daily exercise that they would normally self-regulate based on their perception of time can easily drift and be missed altogether. A similar distorted sense of time was also experienced by our students. Studying at home meant that the lines between study and personal life were blurred. The availability of lecture recordings and asynchronous content enabled students to easily put off doing their work, and following lectures from bed became a normal occurrence. How do astronauts combat this challenge? The solution is actually rather elegant in its simplicity. Key tasks need to be well-defined and scheduled, daily checklists are used to record progress, and mission control holds the astronauts accountable for their required tasks. Taking this approach with our students, we leveraged some of the familiar tools that we have used before, but also required us as the course team to act a little bit more as an overseeing mission control to have that holistic view of what the student had to accomplish. We placed a higher effort on understanding all of the workload and expectations being placed on the students from all of their course teams. We created schedules that included schedule time for normal things that students would do themselves, or time themselves, such as homework. And we leveraged all the checklists and progress capabilities of our learning management system. Students were initially taken aback by how much we could observe and monitor their progress, but were quite receptive of it in the context we presented it. Loneliness and isolation is another challenge that students share in common with astronauts. In a long-duration spaceflight, the time delay in communication means that there would be far less live interaction, and they must rely on asynchronous communication methods, such as recorded video messages. Here we took the concept of recorded messages from home to fill this gap. With the help of an amazing team of teaching assistants, they made weekly video messages to the students. In these messages, the TA shared their own experiences as a student on campus, talked directly to students about common insecurities and struggles in university life, and generally tried to provide some of the important peer interaction that they were grateful to experience themselves when studying on campus. For this activity, we really let the teaching assistants run with it without much interference from us lecturers. We wanted it to feel like a student communication and clearly separate it from the learning goals of the course. As an example, I want to show you a very small excerpt from one of their videos. I just want to say good luck to all of you guys. It's really exciting first exam period. Don't be scared. It's okay. Everything will be fine. And remember that your grades don't define you as a person. So even if it doesn't go well, keep moving forward and you can do it. If you fail an exam, there's always a reset. And if you fail the reset, you know, there's always an extra year. And even if you don't make the exact visa, there's always other bachelors, right? It feels a lot bigger right now than it is because of yourself some slack if things don't work out. And there's always a different route to go. The next challenge we tackled was confronting unexpected issues. We were well aware that as a consequence of having to so rapidly transition our on campus courses to fully online courses, there were going to be some significant hiccups along the way. We all have our own stories of when technology failed us during this past year and the ability of those failures to sour the attitude of students towards their own learning. Here, the astronaut analogy became very useful in framing how students should respond to such hiccups. In a long duration space mission, complaining about a technical difficulty is not an option. If a problem arises, a solution must be found. And that solution is a collective effort between the astronauts and mission control. Finally, there was the challenge of boredom. Luckily, the human space flight to Mars analogy provided an excellent opportunity to have some fun in the course to combat this boredom. We utilized storytelling techniques to jazz up some of the assigned problems, developing elaborate space themed back stories behind why as a space engineer, the students needed to solve a problem in order to reach Mars. We also developed a mission patch to capture the essence of the remote learning experience. Being partially back on campus this quarter, it has been great to see so many students proudly displaying their mission patches on their laptops and motivated to continue their learning journey. What is the takeaway from all of this? What I took away from the past year and this collection of experiences is the importance of empathy and cooperation in the learning process. The human mission to Mars analogy served as a framework to rally students and staff to cooperate, to recognize and address some of the challenges students were facing, and to have a bit of fun. It is important to recognize that the experience shared here are not the outcome of a large educational project or rigorously set up to be evaluated in an educational research context. Like much of this past year, this evolved organically and spontaneously over the duration of the course and perhaps that even added to its success.