Universities deciding whether to continue online this year (updates?)

[dreamingbohemian]

I've been on a few threads this year about whether universities will fully return to face to face learning this year or stay partly online.

My university told staff today that actually all teaching will be back to normal this year. Previously we had thought to keep large lectures online but now they have ditched that to go fully back to normal.

(Apologies for not outing myself by saying which university but it's a large London uni)

Just thought it might be helpful for people/parents to know that these decisions are getting firmed up now, so contact your university if you haven't heard anything yet -- and also just some optimism that maybe universities will be more f2f than expected this year.

@lomaamina so when are you willing to go back ? Others manage to do their jobs in unventilated rooms with lots of people now there are vaccines. Why can't Unis ?
Covid is here to stay and we need to learn to live life normally with it.
And vaccinate all students as soon as they arrive and they can't attend lectures until after 2nd one. V v simple. Oh snd wear masks.

@lomaamina

igelkott2021 you say all the students will be double vaccinated. This is simply untrue, not only for UK students, many of whom will not have had a chance (even if they desire) to get their second jab by the start date, but the thousands of international students for whom we are still waiting to hear what the policy is. The thought of all the new variants appearing in an unventilated seminar room is seriously worrying.

And, while vaccinations give good protection against hospitalisation and death, they cannot guarantee no infections, so saying they're a panacea against having to spend up to two hours in an airless crowded room with hundreds of young people (and rinse and repeat with a new set of hundreds throughout the day) is simply wrong.

When will you be happy to return?

As said before I teach so I'm seeing many students over the week with no SD or masks, and my pupils will never be jabbed. They still get and transmit Covid, as we discovered very acutely last October in my school.

Yes, that would make sense, to vaccinate students before they're able to attend. That's what's happening in many US universities. But it's not so simple: there is no clear policy on this here in the UK and given we're about six weeks away from the start of term, it's already close to too late. (n.b. if they do, I wonder who's going to pay for foreign students to self-isolate while they're waiting for both jabs to take effect?) And of course it requires a different mode of education for the two cohorts of students, so we need notice to prepare to adapt our teaching.

@lomaamina so plan it now. Vaccination mandatory (6 week gap now allowed so time to get them all done). They choose not to they can listen to lecture on line.
International students same as last September - most came over. Lots had never gone home.
Otherwise when ?

And of course it requires a different mode of education for the two cohorts of students, so we need notice to prepare to adapt our teaching.

There’s going to be two cohorts of students anyway. The government has relaxed visa entry dates and universities will have to accommodate those overseas students who are having difficulty getting here. We’ve been told to expect to be teaching f2f and to double up with online sessions, as we did last year.

We do not have mandatory vaccination in the UK in schools and universities though and that is correct. It is one reason we have a high vax uptake in the UK -because we don't impose it.

The thought of all the new variants appearing in an unventilated seminar room is seriously worrying

People should go back & read Erin Bromage's blogs from early 2020 - he would say that a seminar room, unventilated & with people maskless, not socially distanced & talking, is a prime transmission site.

It should be worrying to parents of DC urging us to go back to "normal" - young people can get quite ill from the new variants. As a PP says upthread, a week out from their work (or long COVID) can really play havoc with a student's progress.

And we cannot be sure who is vaccinated or not; the UK government is not permitting universities to require vaccination of students, and obviously, individual staff can't enquire such private medical information from students.

I know that many students at my university flouted most of the rules from September 2020 - and I doubt that my university was unique in that. Why should university staff be required to put themselves at risk from students who flout sensible rules & decide not to be vaccinated?

Vaccination mandatory (6 week gap now allowed so time to get them all done). They choose not to they can listen to lecture on line.

Legally, we cannot do this. The situation here is not the same as the US, and we cannot make education contingent on vaccination or discriminate in delivery between vaccinated and unvaccinated students. Last year we managed to teach entirely unvaccinated students f2f with masks and social distancing, and it was fine (at least from an infection point of view; from the pedagogical perspective, trying to run seminars where discussion was impossible as no one could hear each other properly was pretty disastrous, and had worse results than the online seminars we taught during the lockdown).

Vaccination mandatory

You know that the Government has told universities they may not do this? Once again @mumsneedwine you show how little you know about how universities run.

Why should university staff be required to put themselves at risk from students who flout sensible rules & decide not to be vaccinated?

Why do you think that there are going to be lots of university students who choose not to get vaccinated? From what I’ve heard from my students, they are delighted to have been offered the vaccine and are desperate to minimise the chances of a re-run of last autumn’s endless periods of self-isolation.

Vaccination mandatory (6 week gap now allowed so time to get them all done). They choose not to they can listen to lecture on line.

We can't do this.

So when do you go back then ? Never by the sounds of it as COVID isn't going anywhere. And yes you CAN insist on a vaccine passport, like some nightclubs and pubs are already doing, because you are a private institution.
It seems there will always be a reason for some why they can't do things. Not how they can. Amazing how some Unis are returning f2f (as academics on here have stated), but others can't. Why ?
Why is vaccine mutation so much more likely in a lecture theatre than a school assembly- we had 350+ people in our hall daily for last week of term. And will do again from Sept. Big, large teenagers all crammed in with no masks and indoors open. What's the difference ?
I despair for our young people who seem to be expected to just put up and shut up. I hope they bloody riot.

Oh and it's v easy to see who has been vaccinated. Have you heard of the vaccine passport ? Been in the news quite a bit. Mine is on my phone so v easy to see.

Obligatory vaccination is probably not necessary. The 18-24 age group is currently the highest take up of all age groups under 44, and they've only been open for vaccinations for a few weeks, so there's certainly plenty of demand to have the jabs. Can't find the latest statistics, but it somewhere between 60-65% who've already had their first jab, so they'd be expected to have had their second and be fully "protected" by the time students go back.

@mumsneedwine

So when do you go back then ? Never by the sounds of it as COVID isn't going anywhere. And yes you CAN insist on a vaccine passport, like some nightclubs and pubs are already doing, because you are a private institution. It seems there will always be a reason for some why they can't do things. Not how they can. Amazing how some Unis are returning f2f (as academics on here have stated), but others can't. Why ? Why is vaccine mutation so much more likely in a lecture theatre than a school assembly- we had 350+ people in our hall daily for last week of term. And will do again from Sept. Big, large teenagers all crammed in with no masks and indoors open. What's the difference ? I despair for our young people who seem to be expected to just put up and shut up. I hope they bloody riot.

While I agree that universities should be making a serious effort to offer as much f2f as they can and that they should be transparent with their plans I don't think a blanket 'go back to how it was pre-covid' is a good approach.

Lots of universities were moving towards a blended approach anyway and covid has accelerated that so things should be considered on a more individual course level.

And I also think it's unhelpful to constantly compare universities to schools. They are not the same and it's not a useful comparison.

@SkinnyMirror I'm comparing large gatherings of people in an education setting. Not sure how they differ due to the educational setting ?
And my DD did not at any point get told anything about moving to on line learning at any of the open days or offer holder days she attended. In fact we sat in the lecture theatre and were told they would be in there a lot as students. She signed up to her course on that basis. If the Uni had other plans they must have been lying.

And yes you CAN insist on a vaccine passport, like some nightclubs and pubs are already doing, because you are a private institution.

The government has explicitly said we cannot. We might be private institutions in theory, but we receive government funding, so are not free to do as we wish. The thinking behind this was that the offers that have been made to students are legally-binding and were not conditional upon students being vaccinated, and that universities would be tied up in endless legal battles were they to try to mandate vaccination.

@GCAcademic sorry I thought dear Gav (will try not to get punchy mentioning his name) specifically stated that Unis could ask for vaccine passports ? Like care homes can from Sept.
I'm not sure why we can't make vaccines mandatory really. In Australia and New York you can't go to school if not fully vaccinated and they are not the most repressive regimes. Seems a v sensible idea. If you don't want the vaccine that's fine, you can learn on line only.

@GCAcademic PS wish my DDs went to your Uni as it sounds fab.

@mumsneedwine. I haven’t come across Williamson saying anything about vaccination (and anything that come out of his mouth is highly suspect anyway) but Westminster touted the vaccine passport requirement for students last month only to backtrack rapidly a few days later. Unlike the US, there is no culture here around compulsory vaccination, and much as I hate to say that the government is right about anything, the legalities of it do seem problematic. Offers are legally-binding and I can’t see that universities could impose such a condition at this stage. As someone has pointed out above, US educational establishments routinely require vaccination as a condition of entry, so for them it’s presumably simply a case of adding an additional vaccination. Other than for medical students (I think), we have never done this in the UK, and there would be a huge backlash if we tried.

wish my DDs went to your Uni as it sounds fab.

To be fair, I think it’s more the case that our students have been lucky that we are a large campus university with enough decent-sized teaching space that we’ve been able to provide socially distanced teaching in person. It’s been a lot harder for universities with older buildings and set-ups to do that.

[quote mumsneedwine]@SkinnyMirror I'm comparing large gatherings of people in an education setting. Not sure how they differ due to the educational setting ?
And my DD did not at any point get told anything about moving to on line learning at any of the open days or offer holder days she attended. In fact we sat in the lecture theatre and were told they would be in there a lot as students. She signed up to her course on that basis. If the Uni had other plans they must have been lying.[/quote]
If you genuinely don't see how universities and schools differ then it's pointless trying to have a sensible discussion with you.

It sounds like your daughters university has fallen below expectations. If this is the case then she should consider putting in a complaint.
It doesn't mean all Universities are poor and that any university offering some online teaching is taking the piss though.....

And my DD did not at any point get told anything about moving to on line learning at any of the open days or offer holder days she attended. In fact we sat in the lecture theatre and were told they would be in there a lot as students. She signed up to her course on that basis. If the Uni had other plans they must have been lying

You also need to understand how quickly things changed for universities and how the government moved the goalposts st the last minute.... last years A level fiasco had huge implications.

As for moving content online pre covid .They wouldn't have told your DD this because it probably didn't impact her. Typically these things take years to implement. However, thanks to covid many universities have had to invest in the IT infrastructure far more quickly than planned which means many universities are in the posits to move online sooner. If the university is making significant changes to the course they need to inform the students. We're now working outside emergency covid regs so normal procedures apply.

*position

[quote mumsneedwine]@lomaamina so when are you willing to go back ? Others manage to do their jobs in unventilated rooms with lots of people now there are vaccines. Why can't Unis ?
Covid is here to stay and we need to learn to live life normally with it.
And vaccinate all students as soon as they arrive and they can't attend lectures until after 2nd one. V v simple. Oh snd wear masks.[/quote]
You think it is 'vv simple' to vaccinate all students as soon as they arrive and not let them in lecture theatres until that's done? Really?

@TheMerrickBoy v v v v simple. Universities did tens of thousands of health care students in January in a few weeks. 1,500 a day at each of the 4 vaccine centres in one city. And most students will already be double vaccinated after anyway.