Oh god - here we go again... Dd back at uni 10days and already many

[a8mint]

Dd back at uni 10days and already 2 Of her friends are having to self isolate. Luckily they have all tested negative so far

personally, I've been teaching f2f for months. In crowded unventilated rooms. Hundreds of students every week. Weird how it can be done in schools. Yes I know Unis are different, but no f2f all year is poor. Especially now us oldies are fully vaccinated.

You can't blame uni's for that though. We were only allowed to do f2f teaching between the end of Sept and beginning of December. This all had to be socially distanced. Some uni's and courses found that easier to facilitate than others and the governments complete cock up of A level grades didn't help. That's not an excuse - just the reality.

Sorry if people find it hard to hear but SOME Unis have not provided good provision. And some have.
I agree.

and by not blaming the uni's I mean you can't blame them for the fact that schools have had different policies around f2f teaching.

Either this year are particularly academically weak (never have been up to now) or the teaching has not been good enough

Tat's a very black & white distortion of the multiple reasons for that cohort drop.

Maybe the students weren't particularly "good enough" at online learning? Maybe they weren't as prepared because of their last year at school because: pandemic? Maybe their school teachers were shit?

I taught online (clinically vulnerable) but it was definitely face to face & in person. It was LIVE and I taught far smaller groups and many more hours. As well as preparing short pre-recorded lectures to outline the issues we'd be discussing in the LIVE in person online teaching. And the I established an asynchronous running blog discussion, to follow up from our (multiple) seminars and connect the material week to week.

And then the multiple emails and individual tutorials, pretty much ad libitum.

I think parents have very limited experiences and concepts of what university teaching and learning are nowadays.

And I can see, from reading some of the rudeness expressed by parents on this and other threads, just where the attitude that caused students in my Department to swear at us, send abusive & demanding emails. "Naice" middle class high achieving students at a Russell Group university with internationally leading teaching staff. Swearing at staff, and questioning their expertise. Good luck to them keeping jobs, with these kinds of attitudes.

So me commenting on the rubbish time MY child has had caused someone else mental health issues. I'm sorry but that is ridiculous. And bullying. And vile.

But you don't just comment on your DD's university.

What is bullying and vile is that your posts across this & other threads make unsubstantiated and ignorant generalisations about all universities and all academics.

Ok. Well as mental health is now suffering because of your bullying I'm off. It's my friends birthday today, but she's dead. Dying was not something she expected as a teacher. Her DD has had a shit time at Uni (her tutor refused to see her when she was suicidal) & has dropped out.
I comment on things I know. Not on Unis I don't. But crack on and tell me my all these kids should just suck it up.

@mumsneedwine

Ok. Well as mental health is now suffering because of your bullying I'm off. It's my friends birthday today, but she's dead. Dying was not something she expected as a teacher. Her DD has had a shit time at Uni (her tutor refused to see her when she was suicidal) & has dropped out. I comment on things I know. Not on Unis I don't. But crack on and tell me my all these kids should just suck it up.

I'm very sorry to hear about your friend. I have lost people too - it's been a shit year all round for lots of people and to be quite honest it's not getting better for a lot of us. It's tough.

However, nobody has said students who have had a poor experience should just suck it up. They shouldn't. We're trying help, trying explain why things have happened the way they have. I get that you are angry but you are letting your anger prevent you from seeing anyone else's point of view.

I think most of us know more than one person at uni, and hear and read of students' experiences at a range of unus and courses to say with confidence that rhe situation is mire widespread than their own DCs.
Maybe some lecturers have spent hours crafting what they believe to be wonderful online offerings, but many more unis have shoved up their recordings of last years live lectures

Whether you can use a recording of a previous years lecture will often depend on how you structure your course and its learning outcomes.

In my subject, the traditional model is along the lines of two hours of seminars for every one hour lecture. Particularly for intro courses, the one hour lecture is the information-giving part of the course, it is not designed to be interactive or discursive, it gives the students the theories, concepts, formulas, data and other information that they must know as the basis for everything else that they do.

They then use the information from the lecture as the basis for discussion, development, application and questions in the 2 hours of seminars.

If a recorded lecture is reasonably good quality and the information you need to disseminate to the students remains the same, then it's not the worst thing to use something that has been recorded before. It is the seminars that require the greatest reworking for online learning.

I haven't reused my lectures, but this is mainly because the sound quality from our in-theatre lecture capture system is so poor. In terms of meeting the learning objectives of the course and ensuring the students learn what they need to learn, it makes little difference whether it is delivered live in person, live online, pre-recorded during the pandemic, or pre-recorded last year.

Given that our teaching hours have tripled during the pandemic due to delivering socially-distanced in person seminars alongside online seminars for those who can't or won't attend in person, and that the university asks us not to deliver any lectures live online because the IT infrastructure cannot cope, I wouldn't fault someone who looked at a recording of a lecture they delivered before the pandemic and decided it was good enough quality to re-use.

Maybe some lecturers have spent hours crafting what they believe to be wonderful online offerings, but many more unis have shoved up their recordings of last years live lectures

If all a university has done is shoved up last year's recordings and nothing else then I agree - that's not good practice.
However, I don't know a single university or academic who has done that.

Some may have re-used recordings if appropriate ( a one hour lecture with no interaction if the content is exactly the same) but this should be supported by seminars and tutorials which are 'live'. And live online teaching is still classed as f2f......

Our workload has increased significantly this last year. I speak to a lot of academics across a number of universities and I'm an external examiner at two. All I've seen/heard is how hard academics are working in very difficult circumstances. I'm hearing academics talk about the innovative things they've done to ensure their students get the best experience possible in the current climate.
Our pastoral responsibilities have increased and we've been flexible with deadlines ( at the expense of annual leave in my case - I was marking assignments while on holiday last week) ....... to suggest we're all just shoving up last year's recordings is wrong and insulting.

Yes its been different and not ideal and some universities have done a better job than others but make no mistake, the vast majority of us have worked very, very hard to deliver courses as effectively as possible while dealing with all the other shit a global pandemic throws at us.

OP, it is doubtful that this will ever be "over", just like Flu is never likely to disappear. While it still has different variants that are very virulent then a large part of almost every population in the World is going to have to have top up vaccines (probably for many years to come), maybe every 6 months - we are still in the very early days of this virus, so still have an awful lot to learn.

I am hoping that sooner rather than later it will only be us vunerable ones that need to keep on being vaccinated against it, and that, like the Flu vaccines, it can be reduced to once a year (although hopefully better than the flu vaccines, as they are often not very affective, and can be mainly out of date - virus wise). But OP please make no mistake about this being a
Global pandemic, it most definitely is, and for businesses to succeed, and therefore for most of the countries in the World to be able to survive (and eventually, hopefully, thrive - which of course many of them didn't do even before the pandemic) then Globally we all need to keep on following any, hopefully trusted, regulations in force, and understand that this Pandemic could have been just as bad as any Acopalyptic film at the cinema, and if we suddenly all stop respecting it, it may become even more virulent, and that Apocalypse could still come to pass. We are not safe yet, but I have great hopes that we will be eventually as long as most of us can use some commonsense.

@a8mint

I think most of us know more than one person at uni, and hear and read of students' experiences at a range of unus and courses to say with confidence that rhe situation is mire widespread than their own DCs. Maybe some lecturers have spent hours crafting what they believe to be wonderful online offerings, but many more unis have shoved up their recordings of last years live lectures

"Many more" - interesting, can you give some details on the numbers there?

I delivered high quality live lectures (or rather engaging learning opportunities) every single timetabled session this year. In order to prepare for that I worked every weekday night then tried to catch up on the admin part of my job at the weekends.

I delivered high quality live lectures (or rather engaging learning opportunities) every single timetabled session this year. In order to prepare for that I worked every weekday night then tried to catch up on the admin part of my job at the weekends.

This sounds like the experience of every academic I know.
Certainly at my university and those i work closely with the expectation was teach your timetable - pre recorded content was certainly the exception not the rule.

I think the problem here is that some universities have protected their income from student accommodation by promising something they were not able to deliver. Students should have been told that there wouldn't be blended learning before they signed up to university accommodation or expensive private rents. In protecting campus based accommodation revenue, universities have cost all of their students a lot of money. It doesn't make a student feel that their welfare is a priority. And students have received no additional financial support from the govt for the private rents they had to pay, for houses they may not have lived in for the majority of the contract. A lot of the PT jobs that students do to supplement income also disappeared. They've had it tough and no one noticed or cared.

There's also been a problem with consistency. Universities have set their own no detriment policies, so some kids have been massively advantaged/disadvantaged according to their university. Future employers aren't going to know who had protected grades and who didn't.
There has also been inconsistencies between departments within universities and individual lecturers. Some are much better than others at putting good classes on line, or answering student enquiries in a timely fashion or giving decent feedback. Some tutors are really working hard to deliver good classes and others really are just going through the motions.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously

I think the problem here is that some universities have protected their income from student accommodation by promising something they were not able to deliver. Students should have been told that there wouldn't be blended learning before they signed up to university accommodation or expensive private rents. In protecting campus based accommodation revenue, universities have cost all of their students a lot of money. It doesn't make a student feel that their welfare is a priority. And students have received no additional financial support from the govt for the private rents they had to pay, for houses they may not have lived in for the majority of the contract. A lot of the PT jobs that students do to supplement income also disappeared. They've had it tough and no one noticed or cared.

There's also been a problem with consistency. Universities have set their own no detriment policies, so some kids have been massively advantaged/disadvantaged according to their university. Future employers aren't going to know who had protected grades and who didn't.
There has also been inconsistencies between departments within universities and individual lecturers. Some are much better than others at putting good classes on line, or answering student enquiries in a timely fashion or giving decent feedback. Some tutors are really working hard to deliver good classes and others really are just going through the motions.

Yes, I'd agree with that. It was certainly the case for our local uni that they "promised" blending learning right up to the deadline for campus accommodation and then suddenly they changed their website days after to water down that promise, and in the end, DS go no F2F teaching at all. Not surprising really, because the Uni had already told their teaching staff not to return to campus for the year unless essential. So the lecturers etc for non Lab/practical courses simply havn't been on campus, as evidenced by empty staff car parks throughout. It's a shame they weren't honest with students, but then again, they couldn't be honest, because then they'd have lost all the accommodation fees.

There are some pertinent points being made here and I don't disagree that some universities haven't handled the situation well - the accommodation issue is, understandably, a very sore point. My uni doesn't own accommodation so that hasn't been an issue for us but I can see what a nightmare it's been for students at other universities.

I just want to make a few points though:
Blended learning includes online F2F. That f2f contact doesn't have to be on campus. I'm not saying that is always best but it is still considered f2f if delivered via Teams/Zoom

There has always been inconsistencies between universities and even between university departments. That is how the sector works and will continue to work.

I think people need to take into account the impact the A Level fiasco had on universities ability to deliver on campus activity. This resulted in many universities having to take far more students that they had planned for which made on campus teaching pretty much impossible. I'm not saying that this is an excuse for poor practice but it did have any impact.