Are your universities preparing for closure?

[historyrocks]

There’s been a flurry of emails this afternoon asking for immediate information on student assessment and what to do if exams are cancelled. A member of teaching staff (in a different department) is currently self-isolating, which I think has added a new level of urgency to plans.

My Dd is in her first yr at Kings in London. She had an email yesterday saying that all exams are cancelled and there will be alternative assessments done remotely. She then had a further email from her own faculty (Biosci and Medicine) to say that students need to ensure they have access to certain portholes for online lectures. Her faculty have said they're preparing for closure.

titchy unfortunately you tube no use, our students need our equipment only available on our site, we are very specialised and performances need riggers and technical support and spotters.

Everything going on as normal at my place, including open days. The start of the Easter vacation for undergrads means that the pressure to close has been eased to some extent, although that still leaves thousands of staff and postgrads coughing and sneezing over each other.

We have been quietly (so not to cause panic!) asked to come up with some way of switching assessment for the summer term online. I have a plan for coursework but nobody seems to have any idea how to replicate exam conditions in hundreds of separate location. It has been suggested that we use "alternative" methods of assessment. Unfortunately, no usable alternatives have been proposed so far.

Same lack of information here. Business as usual, though we’re quietly making contingency plans for teaching and assessment. How we’ll manage the unseen exams next term is mind boggling.

All support staff are being asked to WFH tomorrow to see if it can be done on the larger scale, all travel is being cancelled but Open Days are going ahead. Management are running around like headless chickens looking busy for a change.

We have been warned that a move online is imminent. My lectures are online but I have no idea how to move tutorials online. Discussion fora are really not very useful and the conferencing options needlessly complex. My courses have more than 100 in them. Ideas?

I am currently trying to work this out! 300+ students across 20 tutorial groups in my course, but the guidance for running a webinar on Blackboard seems to operate on the premise that everyone will be doing the webinar. Of course this is a moot issue as at the moment I can't even seem to find/add the 'collaborate' option.....

@YetAnotherSpartacus What are your conferencing options?

Something called 'Big Blue Button'!

I'm at a London uni--this morning we were told by management that one of our students is a confirmed case, but to carry on as usual! Then shortly after that my HoD emailed that the open day this Saturday has been cancelled (at last...) and that we'll 'probably' be moving to online teaching next week. But no more detail than that.

Pleased to hear about the open day being cancelled @Belacan. Ours are still on despite the university not recommending travel for staff or students within or without the UK. Aghast! No word yet on teaching moving online.

@YetAnotherSpartacus Zoom or Microsoft Teams are very good for conferencing, works very well across the University I'm at. At least none of the academics are complaining which says something!

I am getting a bit twitchy waiting for the official advice (from my uni or from the govt for that matter!). Do I start cancelling classes and all those student meetings I have lined up for next week??!

• No face-to-face teaching after Friday
• International travel banned until 1 May ay least
• All public events cancelled until 1 May at least
• Working from home encouraged (suspect it'll soon be mandated)

Plus - exams to be done remotely

Plus - exams to be done remotely

I'm interested in this. How?

LSE - all teaching online from 23 March.

Thanks MM. I’ll look those up!

I've only used Zoom for standard remote meetings up until now. But if you want to share handwritten equations/text in small group teaching then its whiteboard feature on a tablet looks promising.

We've had lengthy emails today about preparing for online delivery etc but they are saying business as usual for open days. I'm not too happy about that to be honest.

I want to know too! We find out tomorrow...

Email to say carrying regardless and wash your hands for the rest of term.
Highly unimpressed but no cases in Uni yet I don’t think, once there are hopefully they will close or at least inform us so we can take unpaid leave.
International travel banned so hope this means the international students won’t be going home for Easter or I will be extremely unhappy to work until they have self isolated for a fortnight. Lots of Middle Eastern students close to Iran.

At the moment my department is leaving it up to lecturers whether they want to move online or not but I suspect we will go fully online very soon. Exams will be replaced by some kind of written assessment.

I actually already teach on our online programme and a lot of people in my department do a lot with online tools, so I think we will manage better than most, thankfully.

International travel banned so hope this means the international students won’t be going home for Easter

Could I ask if any of you have any sense of what may happen re university accommodation?

For online discussions/seminars -- we can't run ours live (our students are in every time zone around the world) so we have a discussion board that students contribute to throughout the week. I've seen a lot of people on social media disparaging this but it usually works out quite well for us. The key thing is to set it up with the right questions, and interject with comments here and there to keep the discussion going.

I think a lot of people are putting pressure on to deliver some kind of amazing online course with no notice, but sometimes less is more.