How We Adapted: Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Illustration by Irene Servillo
If you want to move a business school’s curriculum online in a single weekend, you better practice what you teach.
At 9:34 p.m. on Friday, March 6, Grace Lyo was relaxing on the couch in her apartment in Menlo Park watching a movie when she got a text from her boss, Brian Lowery.
“Urgent! Are you available?” wrote Lowery, the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. “Check your email. Come into Zoom.”
Lyo, an assistant dean who leads the Teaching and Learning Hub, a unit within Stanford GSB that provides teaching support to faculty, was surprised to learn that an emergency Zoom meeting of all senior staff was in progress. She checked her inbox and understood why: At 8:19 p.m., [then] Stanford Provost Persis Drell had sent an email announcing that in an effort to reduce physical contact and prevent the spread of COVID-19, all classes at the university would move online as of Monday morning.
“Oh, wow,” Lyo thought. “This is going to be an interesting ride.”
Brian Lowery
The Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior
Jonathan Levin
The President and Bing Presidential Professor
Sarah Soule
The Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Paul Oyer
The Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor and Professor of Economics
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Roderick Kramer
The William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emeritus
Grace Lyo
Assistant Dean, Teaching & Learning
Margaret Long Hayes
Associate Dean, MBA & MSx Programs
Going Digital… by Monday
The school was relatively well poised to go digital: It already had an online business program (Stanford LEAD) with its own dedicated support staff, along with Lyo’s team of experts in course design, digital content, and instructional technology. But there were no fully online degree programs, and many faculty members had little to no experience with remote teaching and learning.
Yet faculty and staff managed to lift 90 courses comprising 124 sections online in just 60 hours. Over the weekend, Lyo’s Teaching and Learning team laid the groundwork for a brand-new website with a built-in support-request system and a library of tips and best practices for remote course delivery, while simultaneously responding to a flood of faculty queries. When Monday morning rolled around, the team held the first of over 10 Zoom training sessions for faculty and their support staff. Stanford GSB became a strictly virtual enterprise.
“It was surprisingly smooth,” Lyo says. “With the caveat that everybody was working like crazy.”
Emergency Planning Pays Off
Both the school and the university had for decades engaged in extensive emergency planning, which paid off. An operational command and a policy group were formed the week of March 9, and the senior staff met almost continuously in the dean’s conference room to manage the rapidly evolving situation.
“It felt like we were in there all day, every day, each of us with our own bottle of hand sanitizer close by,” says Sarah A. Soule, at the time a professor of organizational behavior and senior associate dean in charge of executive education. (Soule was named Stanford GSB dean in January 2025.)
Hour by hour, new questions would arise: What if the county orders the residence halls emptied? How far in advance should executive education programs be postponed? What about the spring quarter? Deans ran scenarios and rendered decisions with scarce information and a great deal of uncertainty.
“It was like a war room in there: crisis after crisis, patch one up and move on to the next.”
Paul Oyer
Making Lemonade
Faculty and students agree: A big part of the Stanford GSB experience is the people. Students felt a sense of loss being isolated from in-person contact with the campus community.
Faculty began exploring ways of introducing a sense of intimacy and immediacy to their Zoom classrooms by using features like polling and breakout sessions, and creating online opportunities for informal encounters that the school’s physical campus — now a ghost town with yellow caution tape plastered across every potential gathering place — normally encourages.
New courses like Reflections on History in the Making, which allows students to document and process their own pandemic experiences, and Civic Workshop, where small teams of students launch projects to help communities affected by COVID-19, were quickly developed.
“We’re trying really hard to turn lemons into lemonade and use this as an opportunity to innovate in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily have done had the pandemic not forced us to,” says Soule.
Read the full, original story to learn more about Stanford GSB’s response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
