Going online is something universities are doing to ensure the students continue to study and the university running, there is no other option, nobody gets to have exactly what they want while we are fighting a pandemic
At last! some straightforward logical thinking.
To make the point yet again - universities are not closed. All our colleagues are working, we are all doing our jobs through the lockdown. How we teach may change - temporarily - while the whole world sorts out how to live with a vicious virus.
We are thinking fast & hard about how to offer practice-based teaching :
labs for STEM & Humanities students,
hands-on training for health-care students,
studio practice for arts & creative arts students,
archives and non-digitisable materials for humanities students (eg historians, archaeologists)
As well we are trying to preserve and enhance what is central to a university education: the opportunity to learn through discussion and debate with peers, framed and facilitated by expert academics.
There is a difference between teaching and learning. Parents and students who are used to the target driven teaching-to-the-test of secondary education, may be unused to and puzzled by the shift that we as academics facilitate and guide - the shift from us teaching to students learning.
Learning opportunities are offered. Most students take them up, and we love to see them fly! We get very disheartened by those undergrads who resist the opportunities offered.
I was educated in what is probably still the best university in the country for my discipline. I was an undergraduate about 35 years ago - I was extremely well-taught, by world-leading experts in my field. But their attitude was that I was an adult, I made my choices, I worked out how and what I wanted to learn - they were there to structure that learning, offer knowledge and content from their expertise, challenge me, push me, ask me questions, guide and frame my learning. That's how I still teach.
They were not distracted by the hand-holding guidance & support, and the step-by-step work we have to do with students now - not on content knowledge. but on how to learn.
I think this isn't that students nowadays are less intellectually able (although more of the less able attend university, which is a mixed blessing) but because the schooling system has moved from a vision of education as a social and personal good, to education as a mercenary means to ... well, I'm not sure what it leads to now. Topping the league tables?
It's tail wagging dog, cart before horse etc. - aiming to get an A rather than aiming to develop the understanding that might lead to an A. Or not, but you'll have actually learnt something.
And we academics get three years to put this the right way around so students learn how to learn, not how to get top grades. Top grades mean nothing. But students now see them as an end in themselves. Sadly so do parents.