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

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.

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