UK universities’ promise of face-to-face teaching is risking academics’ health     Permalink

Steven Fielding, writing in The Guardian:

Academics’ workloads have increased substantially over the years, with greater numbers of students to teach and more administration, while their pay has been suppressed and pension entitlement reduced. They are among the most highly stressed employees in Britain. As a result, they have supported strikes in unprecedented numbers during the past two years. Despite that, and the existence of a risk-free alternative, their managers clearly feel they can push them that little bit more into putting their health in danger.

Vice chancellors’ insistence on campus teaching risks the health of academics, which, when they fall ill, will disrupt learning and teaching.

Outbreaks of coronavirus on campuses will require campus lockdowns and the suspension of classroom activities, which will disrupt learning and teaching.

Unless laboratory or clinical work is essential to the learning outcomes, all learning and teaching should move online to allow academics to safely shepherd their students through their education.

Eager to support students or greedy for money?     Permalink

The Times:

Universities said that the government did not consult them about its decision to withdraw last week’s A-level results and use teachers’ predictions. The number of pupils who qualify for first-choice offers has risen substantially. Universities called in lawyers to see what their obligations were to the thousands of pupils who were given offers but did not originally make the grade.

It is a fundamental principal of good policy making that stakeholders are properly consulted and their views considered. Universities are key stakeholders, but so are student bodies, schools and school and university labour unions.

There will now be universities that accept students and others that do not.

From the same article in The Times:

Cambridge and Durham universities have said that if courses are full then places next year will be kept open for the applicants. Universities are reluctant to offer all of these applicants places next year, though, because this would seriously affect the chances of next year’s cohort. “It’s a real mess. It feels like the government has shifted responsibility for this crisis from itself to universities and we’ll get the blame when students don’t get places they want,” one head of admissions said.

HuffPost:

HuffPost UK spoke to representatives from University College London, the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and Queen Mary University of London, who have said they would be accepting all students who met the terms of their original offer.

The trouble for students is they do not know which universities are genuinely at capacity and worried about the quality of learning and teaching, which universities are trying to manage next year’s demand, and which universities are trying to generate as much cash from UK students as possible, given worries about postgraduate taught programmes and international students.

Students should be asking some hard questions about the number students on their programme, compared to last year, and about the number of staff sacked when vice chancellors panicked about university finances.

Universities need to end their silence     Permalink

The CDBU:

The current failure does not only lie with Ofqual, but with a timid and divided university system that has forgotten its values. Our universities are charities, not for-profit corporation, with a duty to students and the public.

Well said.