The President of Waterford IT has commended lecturers, staff, and students for their contribution to keeping third level education going in the South-East, despite what he called a six hour turnaround to move classes online.
In March the college moved to a hybrid system, delivering the vast majority of their 3,000 courses solely online, but keeping labs open for science and engineering students to continue their workshop work.
Last weekend the Institute was named Ireland's best on the Sunday Times list, as the college moves towards establishing a South-East University alongside IT Carlow.
But speaking to Beat News, William Donnelly said the institution weren't given much notice as the pandemic situation evolved rapidly.
"Well in actual fact we got six hours' notice to migrate from delivering programs within the Instutue, to online, last March."
"You can imagine going from 3,000 courses in the classroom, to delivering 3,000 courses online, it took a huge amount of effort and a huge level of innovation and support, right across the institute.
"I have to commend both the lecturers and the support staff in the institute (in) how they have delivered that, and the satisfaction level of our students is extremely high.
"We were lucky in one way that we had already invested a lot of resources at delivering online programs, particularly for people in industry and in collaboration with industry. So we had a foundation there."
Fast forward a summer of uncertainty later, and WIT welcomed its first freshers since the onset Coronavirus pandemic, who are currently participating in more on-campus activities than their colleagues in other years, something which Donnelly felt was important to their experience.
"The area I'm particularly concerned for is the First Year students. It's wonderful to see them coming in, and for them to be able to engage in third-level experience for a short period of time every week is important...
"Because you hear a lot of negative comment about students and what students are doing - the maturity of the students, the way students are adhering to the rules and regulations is fantastic.
"They're a great bunch of people, the students we have here in the South-East.
Students that will soon be availing of a University in the South-East for the first time, with the Technological University expected to be delivered by January 1st 2022.
And despite the pandemic, Donnelly is confident the region will have a University by the beginning of 2022.
"The most important milestone really is submitting the application and the visit of the international panel; because this has to stand up academically, and the international panel will stress test our ability to deliver a Technological University, but we're hugely confident that we'll pass that test.
