Trying to prep for 20/21

[AlwaysColdHands]

Arghhhh!!
We seem to be gearing up for two scenarios:

1. Blended, with reduced f2f, prioritised for year 1, but expectation that all students will come onto campus at some point (staggered times, small groups etc etc). Logistical nightmare to say the least, all delegated down to academics to propose solutions.

1. Wholly online in case of further lockdown

So I may need to transform an undergrad module into an online version with bells and whistles AND got to take on a new postgrad course. How to do this with no school and nursery ???? Dreading the summer and feeling so stressed about September..........who’s in the same boat? 😥
Misery loves company and all that.....

Our union has tried to get meetings with SMT to thrash this out Mumteedum but apparently with not much success.

Has UCU come up with guidelines yet?

Without further guidance from the government, it is quite hard for HR to come up with guidelines. For example, if somebody in a clinically extremely vulnerable group cannot teach face to face in a programme that absolutely requires face to face teaching, who is going to be responsible for paying that staff member? Will the government provide some kind of statutory sick pay to cover such cases long term?

It's also becoming increasingly clear that the risk categories are not very well understood i.e. we don't completely know who is at elevated risk.

@dwnldft yes it's crap. But it's crap being told you're on a list of conditions considered higher risk and not given any help with that too. Think I'd rather not be on a list than told I'm higher risk and to just get on with it. I'm potentially looking at 12-15 hours face to face teaching in the same room with a rotation of 60 student contacts per week. No idea how to feel about that. Those students will all be mingling everywhere at uni too of course.

8I'd also be interested to know whether anyone in moderate or higher risk groups have had support or guidance on this from HR?*

I've had nothing - I'm pretty pissed off about this.

I won't be teaching in person (over 60, asthmatic) but what I worry about is that I'll get lots of student dissatisfaction - I don't want to disclose either my age or my health status to students, but if the University doesn't have a very clear and strong message about the safety of staff (they don't at the moment) then students may start whingeing - I teach quite an entitled lot.

Has anyone's university surveyed them about their health or shielding status?

we have a medical school - if they just set it up so that we could all be tested weekly, and students only permitted to attend in person with two weeks of negative tests & no symptoms, I'd feel a little more safe.

At the moment, I just can't trust that the 18-22 year olds - who are at minimal risk, should they catch the virus - will be responsible about thinking about the risk they pose to others.

At the very least, universities should be requiring anyone in an enclosed space ie inside, to be wearing a face mask, properly (not slung around the chin) or providing everyone with those face shields that hairdressers have.

Anyone asked to teach face to face and simultaneously deliver the class online (monitoring the chat/questions/tech issues etc)?

Agree @CatandtheFiddle and yes @lionheart that's me as well!

I'm very concerned with my workload this year. It's looking like we will need to record lectures, run virtual seminars and workshops and run face to face workshops for those who can make it into the buildings so that automatically increase my workload by about 2 hours for each session. The prep required to recreate all my content is also going to be almost unmanageable. It's not just rolling out slides on teams, it's changing the entire presentation of ideas, learning new apps, changing workshop exercises so it works online.

All of this I realise is part of the territory but our management don't seem like they're going to factor it into our workload at all and are pretending this all requires simply pressing a record button on our old lectures.

@ Bellesavage

This is my main concern - expected to prep all this over the summer with no childcare & also supposed to take my holidays.

Not been given 20/21 workload yet, promised for 2 months now....,

Interesting article on this topic in the Guardian:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/07/britain-universities-teaching-timetables-coronavirus

The author gets the complexities involved in timetabling and so on, and the general state of universities but the forecast is pretty dire:

"Britain’s universities increasingly look like the late Soviet economy, running down their social capital behind a glitzy screen of Potemkin imagery and glasnost-era statistics. Bits of it are locking up, alternately insulted and goaded by the gap between central government diktat and the reality on the ground. The result will be the same: a very long slide into mediocrity and mendacity."

This is interesting as well. It’s the US, where the situation is worse than here, and the semester starts earlier, but still relates to concerns that some have posted on here:

www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/coronavirus-college-professors.html

For the first time ever, I think, I was told I shouldn't be doing as many seminars. I suggested I reduce my lectures as the students would actually get me not just a recording, in the seminars, but I was told no, I need to remove my interesting seminar not my borderline-boring lecture.

I read worryingly that US-based international students weren't allowed to come back to the US if their college course is all online. So they may well have rented an apartment and/or have a job that they can't do from their home country (to pay for their college) but they can't go to the US.

Can anyone link to the OfS guidance on contact hours please? I’m very concerned to hear that recorded lectures don’t count as contact hours!

My current puzzle is that on the one hand we're being told to have as much asynchronous teaching as possible, but on the other, that it cannot be high bandwidth (so recorded videos highly problematic).

@impostersyndrome I would think that download able videos aren't as difficult necessarily as streamed (live) content?

I mean for students with bandwidth issues?

@Mumteedum, perhaps I’m not using the right terminology, and yes, not as bad as live streaming, but we’ve had students this year who don’t have a computer with the capacity to store the files, and an internet speed that can handle large files.

Ah yes, see what you mean. Didn't mean to be a pedant. Just trying to understand. I am not sure what the answer is. 2e need funds to address digital poverty.

@impostersyndrome I'm thinking of putting any asynchronous lecture content on YouTube (unlisted) which I'm hoping will solve any issues of storage. Would that help for what you're doing?

@Igglepigglesgrubbyblanket thanks, that’s a good idea. Though how do you prevent it being shared outside the course?

@Mumteedum absolutely, I don’t know what the solution is. It’s not just a question of hardware, but more fundamentally internet access, and space and peace to work.

@impostersyndrome I can't prevent it being shared, but it won't be searchable.

Totally agree @Mumteedum. The difference has really shown in the marks this term.