Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

If marketing pushed that university was all about fun, then the marketing was wrong. Students can have a lot of fun at university, but the point of going is to study.

But they need approval/facilities provided by the Uni. If you need a lecture theatre, and the Uni won't give you permission "due to covid", then the society can't run, likewise access to the observatory for the astronomy club, etc.

If Unis are providing common rooms, gyms, cafes/bars/shops, libraries, and other facilities, then they should ensure they remain available when allowed and not just shut everything down for protracted periods for their convenience/cost savings

And by this you mean during a time everyone was advised to work from home wherever possible? Universities should have kept everything open, at the direct cost of older staff who might not want to risk their health? Remember students are in an age group very unlikely to die from Covid. But our maintenance and caretaker and library and kitchen and security and cleaning staff are often much older, some for example men and women in their 60s with health issues; and they are not, overwhelmingly, middle-class. But they are meant to be jumping to it to keep things open for a few fit young 20 year olds? Okay. Those priorities are telling ones.

Not to mention that, like any other business, we could only avoid mass redundancies by closing down and furloughing nearly all non-academic staff. Huge amounts of rental, conference and grant income simply disappeared. Furlough kept things afloat, as with large parts of the entire economy.

@antelopevalley I agree, if you got on the property ladder right out of the gate and weathered the 2008 crash ok, 44 isn’t bad. No, we’ve not got golden pensions (that’s ok if you’ve got equity) and we don’t have jobs for life (but are often youngish, have some skills/expertise and corporate savvy enough to jump around and not take shitty jobs from shitty companies). If you didn’t get on the property ladder, or you got burned in 08, it could be pretty crappy. There’s variation. Covid was a more uniform impact. Also, absorbing that impact as an adult, with fully developed brain and adequate resilience and coping systems (or at least adequate so far) is vastly different to an immature adult. Especially as they traditionally rely on one another for support and don’t live together and are not supported by parents in the sane way younger children are. I do think they are more vulnerable that we are allowing them, because it looked cushy. But their coping resources were severely impacted when they should have been forming.

But we’re the hirers. If, for you, it’s as good as it gets in living memory, and you’re hiring a generation where it’s a shitty as it gets in living memory, empathy is not free flowing and you’re going to have conflict. I think that is as much the issue as the impact itself.

@user1497207191 you can not have an astronomy club, but some clubs can still operate or new ones set up.
But I do find in general young people are not interested in setting things up, instead talking about what they wish existed.

It didn’t used to be. Many graduates don’t use their degree in their work. Graduates used to denote a level of application, maturity, research ability and transferable skill that non-graduates didn’t have. I don’t think that’s the case any more. Especially at the moment.

Trust me now is not as good as it gets in living memory. I look back to the Olympics of 2012 and years before as the best time nationally.
The impression I get is that young adults now get a lot of support and practical help from parents for quite a number of years. I had nothing after I left home at 18. I am not arguing for that, but all I had was friends to help. And that was tough at times.
I am not denying the pandemic caused issues for young people. But I think the victim mentality of the generation who have had it worse than anyone ever is not true, and more importantly does not help them.

Not really, no. For 4 modules, there were no F2F lectures, they were all online (for 1 they were all pre-recorded rather than "live" and for others, there was a mix of live and last year's recorded lectures). For the other 4, they were all supposed to be in person, but there were lots of last minute cancellations where they were online instead.

Re attendance, there's clearly two groups, those that want in person and those that want online. Why don't Unis offer that choice? I.e. why don't they make clear which are in person (and then there should be an expectation of it properly being in person, both from the teaching side and student side), and other options which are specifically online for those who don't want face to face? This trend of weasel wording "blended learning" or "face to face where possible" does no one any favours as it's not clear and is basically misleading students.

Unfortunately, technology has led us to this issue. There was a time when missing a lecture was detrimental to the student, but during the past decade or so, recording lectures has become the norm, so that means students can easily catch up if they miss one. It also feeds into the mindset of getting accustomed to just watching them online afterwards if they don't benefit from the "in person" aspect due to poor lecturers etc.

There is a further issue of time-table clashing, especially with, again, a more modern trend for "mix and match" subjects, i.e. Natural science or Maths with Physics, etc etc., where timetable clashes are inevitable so students will have no option but to choose which lecture they attend when there is a clash or overlap. Yes, for some modules, the lectures are duplicated due to very high numbers, but for others, it's just one lecture!

I'm sure there are students who are too lazy to attend, but it's likewise very lazy for lecturers to whinge about the entire cohort, when many do attend or others have valid reasons for not attending! Also, with these past two years affected by covid (though not sure why the last year was so badly affected!), there'll be lots of students who've had protracted periods back home, so they'd have expected to be on campus, but in reality, weren't there as much as they expected, especially when a number of their modules were online. Not much point staying on campus for 1 or 2 lectures per week when all the others are online!

So middle class! “Why didn’t the university ensure Mr Hourly-Paid Building Caretaker, age 60, should be on site to open up the astronomy observatory for student clubs, during a nationwide pandemic where 1,000 older people were dying a day? Scandalous.”

Re attendance, there's clearly two groups, those that want in person and those that want online. Why don't Unis offer that choice? I.e. why don't they make clear which are in person (and then there should be an expectation of it properly being in person, both from the teaching side and student side), and other options which are specifically online for those who don't want face to face? This trend of weasel wording "blended learning" or "face to face where possible" does no one any favours as it's not clear and is basically misleading students.

For the obvious simple reason that duplicating all teaching online and in person requires either employing twice the number of lecturers or halving the students’ contact time.

The point was indeed work from home "where possible". If you work in a place where it's not possible, then you go to work! Closing everything down was fair enough during the lockdowns themselves, but there was no reason for the widespread shutdown between lockdowns!

If Unis made the decision to close down their premises, then that should have extended to their student accommodation. It was grossly unfair and almost criminal to promise blended learning, "normal as much as possible", etc to "encourage" students to sign up for campus accommodation, and then shut everything down for the full year, so there was no benefit/need in them being on campus! Yes, I know they needed the student accommodation fees, but that's the Uni's problem to finance itself, not fleecing their students for accommodation fees and then in a lot of cases, refusing to refund when the student realises nothing is going on and decides to return home!

@user1497207191 There were lots of last-minute cancellations because staff were still catching Covid. Or had to stay home with a child who had covid. Or who was required to isolate, until that requirement was dropped. Universities were still trying to provide in-person. As the airports and other services have shown recently, people are still getting sick and so can’t come to work. In the case of universities, that meant some adjustments, and but doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to provide in-person.

As @theclangersarecoming has said, having both online & in-person is unworkable without doubling staff or doubling their workload. And it would fundamentally change the nature of most universities. If you want online learning, the OU is absolutely fantastic at it. Meanwhile, we’ll be back on-campus come September, just as we were last September, and tried to be throughout the year as much as circumstances would allow.

Why wouldn't you give the online students access to the recordings of the in person lectures? As for seminars and tutorial groups, they're small groups anyway, so you'd have a mix of some groups F2F and other groups online, so again, no extra staffing needed. Obviously the exams have to be different - or do they? - "online" students could attend Uni for in person exams or other pre-arranged necessary in person meetings/group activities etc rather than a default assumption of them being there all the time. My DS was certainly surprised at the sheer number of students in his exam hall this year, most of whom he'd never seen before, who presumably were working from home rather than attending campus!

I agree that the usp of Open University is distance and online learning. It is also cheaper. If you want that kind of learning why not go there?

But you’re missing the point entirely - the government instructed that universities close at certain points during lockdown. At others as many efforts were made to provide essential teaching as possible, including online. Many staff had to be furloughed or lose their jobs. They were not available for non-essential work like “astronomy clubs”, which in any case contravened the regulations regarding bubble mixing, number of people in rooms and so on.

I hear you @user1497207191 and I did say, it shouldn’t be a cold experience or whatever, the fun side of uni does matter. I certainly enjoyed it and would be churlish not to recognise that’s part of the experience, of course it is. But the question is whether the current/existing support measures in place (in some unis) are proportionate or even helping, given where we are now? We can’t go back, and fwiw I agree that students were short changed, but going forwards is there a resilience problem and what can be done about it, because realistically life and the word of work isn’t able to accommodate finding green pens triggering, or being unable to meet any deadlines (again: no one is saying this is all students/uni leavers, but it does sound like a growing %).

@Bibbetybobbity I think there will be an increasing backlash by employers. This will probably be reported in the media and some parents will take the issue on board.

Thatit really what we actually did, but you seem not to understand that! And yes, it is a lot of extra work for staff. You can’t just duplicate in person and online without it involving extra work. For one thing, you can’t do lecture capture properly in in-person lectures as if you’re on Zoom. It’s done via different software, like Panopto, which requires giving the lecture once for lecture capture and then again in person.

Why? What was so utterly horrific about university in the early 2010's? Because I never saw people destroyed by university...there were always a few who didn't cope well the pressure, wih prexisting issues etc, but they were rare.

Why wouldn't you give the online students access to the recordings of the in person lectures? As for seminars and tutorial groups, they're small groups anyway, so you'd have a mix of some groups F2F and other groups online, so again, no extra staffing needed.

Many modules have just one seminar group and — when you get to Year 2 and beyond — are sufficiently specialised that only one member of staff can teach it. A recording of a live lecture is also going to be a poor quality experience. It’s acceptable in extremis but not as the basis for an actual online course.

Completely agree OP. I am a teacher and gave a 6th form tutor group and really feel we go pupils and students no favours by medicalising every setback and making excuses and extending deadlines instead of helping them with strategies to meet the deadlines, or coping with the fallout from not meeting them. A friend and I were discussing the emergency services response to a n incident here today and how they could not simply pleased that they need ‘extra time’ they had to deal with the situation professionally without excuses, and wondering how done of our pupils would cope in real jobs with inflexible time constraints.

DS is studying a practical, creative and tech-heavy subject at an arts university. In first year 20/21, lockdown meant there were no opportunities for hands-on training in the use of big film and TV cameras, sound equipment and edit suites. Last year's first year cohort have had close to the full experience. He's a bit jaundiced that he paid full fees and accommodation costs for a poor facsimile of the course. But having spent a couple of years working while he decided on his course of study, he's fairly scathing about the work ethic of many of his (younger) peer group.

Yes - if I’m teaching one final year 2hrs/week seminar (on, say, the Frankfurt School, or death in early modern Europe, or Postcolonial Australian film or whatever), with 20 students, if half want to do it online and half in person then that’s four hours a week not two. Who else is supposed to be stepping in to help out? Or am I just expected to double my workload… seems like parents think so.

We actually had a lot of complaints about online lecturing and lecturers overwhelmingly reported that engagement was less than when they lectures/taught in person. I think it is not so simple as "some want in person, some want online". It is easy, if they have been basically doing online for a year and a half, to feel that this is what they want, but when they actually have to attend in-person, realising they get 100% more out of it, it's more social, it's more participatory...

A learning experience for me has been that starting a MN thread is very bad for my work output, as I've been drawn back to it like a moth to the flame! Tomorrow I have an interview for a senior post, in which I shall talk disingenuously about my work ethic and ability to focus 😂

Ah, good luck @Jourdain11 !!