Move online, save staff, students and local communities, and prepare for the future     Permalink

Andrew Chitty, Feliciy Callard and Warren Pearce, writing for USS Briefs:

In this brief we argue that: first, given the current UK prevalence of Covid-19, there is a significant risk that any given student or member of teaching staff who attends weekly face-to-face teaching events (lectures, seminars, workshops, laboratories) throughout the autumn term will catch Covid-19; second, that this risk extends indirectly to all workers on campus, including cleaners, professional services staff, and canteen staff; and third that anyone who catches Covid-19 is at significant risk of developing serious illness.

We conclude that any university that holds regular face-to-face teaching events will be putting the health of its students and teaching staff (and indirectly also its other workers and members of the local community) in danger, violating both its legal and moral responsibilities to them. Therefore, with certain exceptions that we lay out below, and in the absence of comprehensive and regular testing, universities must cancel face-to-face teaching this autumn and move to an all-online model.

This is a detailed, sustained and cogent argument for UK universities to commit to online only teaching, at least for first semester.

Staff, students and local communities should be putting pressure on universities to commit accordingly.

Staff, students, vice chancellors, parents and employers should be pressing the government to provide support to make the UK a world leading distance education provider.

This crisis should be seen as an opportunity, not to cut staff, but to invest in new methods of learning. Keeping the best of small group interaction (taken online using the new bread of video conferencing platforms) will enable UK online learning to deliver higher level learning outcomes and justify higher course prices on the international market.

Those methods should then diffuse from full-time undergraduate and taught postgraduate teaching to enable new life-long learning opportunities.

We deserve a better class of scoundrel     Permalink

Ian Dunt wrote this about politicians:

If we can’t have ethics, we are least entitled to a bit of class. Politicians who attempt to deceive the public will obviously lose our admiration, but it would be nice if they could bring a little style and accomplishment to doing so.

Staff and students at UK universities probably (and almost certainly rightly) think the same about vice chancellors and principals.

Exams fiasco ‘will be nothing compared to brewing scandal’ of education inequality     Permalink

Andy Gregory, reporting for The Independent:

“Children in state schools in the most deprived areas have lost four months of education and those in the private schools, we know from the figures, they have their classes going on with online platforms all the time,” said Professor Stephen Reicher, who also participates in the Sage subcommittee for behavioural science, SPI-B.

“That’s a massive inequality. If that isn’t taken into account in the way we think about the academic year, and in the way we organise the exams, then there will be a scandal every bit as much as this year, and like this year we cannot wait until it happens to deal with it.

The government must address this issue. It is no solution to encourage universities to be flexible on their entry criteria if students then perform badly and have their confidence destroyed because they are underprepared for university studies.

Universities do not have the resource, nor do the timetables between results and the start of term allow, for programmes to help students catchup on missed secondary education.

The solutions are in the resourcing of schools, comprehensive IT provision, school meals, study spaces, and support for teachers so that all of the supporting infrastructure is in place to allow all students to thrive.