Warwick Uni (less face to face than last year!)

[Daisysway]

For those students applying in 2022. Really think twice about applying to Warwick University for any of the Bioscience Courses.

My dd just going into year 2 and she's got less f2f teaching than last year! Only 50 percent of her tutorials are f2f this term, all lectures are online and she only has 6 LABS all year.

There apparent excuse is they have a larger in take this year so more tutorials.

Shocking behaviour from a top 10 University.

My son is at a RG university, its official line is blended learning. He's had three (on line) pre start of term sessions this week where his lecturers have said they don't feel safe returning and will stay online, he's incredibly disappointed, he had no face to face last year.

It just all feels wrong.

@LloydColesCommotions

My son is at a RG university, its official line is blended learning. He's had three (on line) pre start of term sessions this week where his lecturers have said they don't feel safe returning and will stay online, he's incredibly disappointed, he had no face to face last year.

It just all feels wrong.

I wonder if those members of staff have kids in school…

@LloydColesCommotions

My son is at a RG university, its official line is blended learning. He's had three (on line) pre start of term sessions this week where his lecturers have said they don't feel safe returning and will stay online, he's incredibly disappointed, he had no face to face last year.

It just all feels wrong.

That is so pathetic. I’m sorry. Some of us have worked throughout, for the public good, sitting in crowded rooms, even before vaccines. Even more are going to work as teachers and travelling on crowded public transport to busy offices. What makes lecturers any different? They at least know they have a highly vaccinated cohort of students to lecture to. Makes me furious.

At our university lecturers can't just decide not to offer f2f, if they are not comfortable doing large lectures they need to arrange f2f equivalents (eg small group teaching)

I suspect more to do with the top universities having to take on much higher number of students for the past 2 years, due to the inflated A level grades. Can't just magic labs out of nowhere to accommodate them. We have already seem in the news pressure on trying to accommodate them all in halls.
At least the past 2 years cohort have gained from higher A levels and more going to the prestigious universities than previous and possible future years. Less f2f may be the price some students have to pay.

They have openly said its due to over recruitment... They haven't even got enough room for groups of 8 in their tutorial groups.

Warwick fails now on every reason my dd chose the university.

Like I initially stated think twice before applying for life sciences courses because 2022 intake will not be any better at Warwick.

@Dove0709.

Its crap for the students that chose Bio courses and they certainly should not be getting 9k fees for over recruitment.

Did the over recruiters give students a chance to defer? I realise that pushes the issue along a year but this mess has ant working either is it

I noticed that in the Times good universities guide on Sunday Warwick was praised for their response to Covid. It just shows what a waste of times these surveys are

Unfortunately those of us with kids who started last year saw a lot of this coming!

There were some institutions which put pretty much everything online for the whole of last year. They were oversubscribed due to last years exam results, had nervous lecturers and made little effort even to get 1st years in in small groups. But they didn't tell the students this until they'd all signed up to accommodation and were on campus! There are loads of threads on here of students who didn't meet a single person from their course last yr.

There's a couple of institutions I tried to warn people about, to have a really good look at what actually happened on the ground with their students last year. There's a poster on here who was advising her year 13 pupils to do their research carefully!

However prestigious they may be the student may end up doing an online degree! Fine if that's what they want, but most don't.

The ranking was clearly done before this term started - I doubt Warwick will do so well next year…

But online or not some universities’ degrees on a CV will open more doors than others .

Warwick did well last year partly because, unlike some other universities, the vast majority of courses did some face-to-face teaching whenever they were allowed to. Some departments did all teaching except lectures face-to-face.

There is inevitably variation between departments and courses in terms of what is possible.

Small departments that just need a room somewhere to teach in (for example, Philosophy as referenced above by @pourmeanotherglass) are able to, and should be expected to, deliver the majority of their teaching face-to-face.

Big departments, those that are very dependent on large lectures, and those that require specialist facilities face greater difficulties and will end up having to deliver less face-to-face teaching. There are not enough rooms, staff or actual existing time for them to turn all their teaching into small group teaching.

This is why Maths (a big, large lecture dependent course) will have more teaching hours online, and Life / BioSciences (the course of @Daisysway's DD) is particularly badly hit because it is a big course, that has usually had a lot of large lectures, and it requires specialist facilities rather than just any room someone can find in the university (and, I think, it is not taught on central campus, further limiting their access to centrally timetabled rooms).

Universities are trying to prevent rapid transmission of Covid through their student and staff population. Students being vaccinated will help, but vaccinations are not 100% effective in preventing people catching Covid.

Even though they may not become terribly ill, students who have to isolate with Covid will be confined to their rooms and will lose both academic and social interactions. Some universities will provide online teaching for those on isolation, others will just expect students to catch up as best they can. Staff who catch Covid will not be able to teach face-to-face and may be unable to teach at all. University terms/semesters are short. Missing a couple of weeks can mean missing a significant part of a module.

In the worst case scenario (but one that all universities are planning for), Covid cases become so high that face-to-face teaching is no longer feasible or even a local lockdown is imposed. In that case all students risk being confined to their rooms again for an indefinite period. No university wants that, and they are taking the steps they consider appropriate to avoid it.

To be honest, I quite enjoyed my online tutorials last year. They were a different experience to in person ones but I wouldn’t say a worse experience. The quality of education was the same. I’m a humanities student though, which probably makes a big difference.

Sunday Times said 24/27 universities are doing a combination of F2F and online learning. So not just Warwick. In schools pregnant teachers are doing remote lessons.

@mellicauli

Sunday Times said 24/27 universities are doing a combination of F2F and online learning. So not just Warwick. In schools pregnant teachers are doing remote lessons.

Not all schools. My dd's very, very pregnant teacher did the first three weeks of term, in the classroom, and has just started her maternity leave.

@mellicauli

Sunday Times said 24/27 universities are doing a combination of F2F and online learning. So not just Warwick. In schools pregnant teachers are doing remote lessons.

Think the vast majority are doing blended f2f and online and that's perfectly reasonable in the current situation.

The issue is where that refers to 2hrs f2f a fortnight!
Or labs online which really need to be in person for appropriate skills to be gained.

Maths isn't my strong point but surely if numbers of 1st year students have increased by 10%,thats probably 5 tutor groups yet Warwick Life Sciences have scrapped at least 22 tutor groups for each year (in the region of 66 for all years). Warwick also increased the size of the Biomed Science tutor groups to 9 when they are usually 6 to 8. Not sure what the drop out was last year but 3 dropped out of my dds group.

In terms of keeping students safe what is the difference between a f2f tutorial one week and not one the following week... I didn't know that infections are less every other week?

If there is not enough room space for the 5 extra tutor groups for 1st years in the Life Science buildings why can't they use other space on site.. Maybe the break out rooms in the conference centre.

I got off an aeroplane on Monday 200 people sat close together in a confined space for over 2hrs...please tell me how this is allowed yet out children can't get the education they are paying for and even worse have been so misled that they are raking up unneeded accommodation costs too.

I'm so incredibly angry about this surely there must be a way of suing the Universities for accommodation costs for misleading students.

Sunday Times said 24/27 universities are doing a combination of F2F and online learning.

There are more than 27 universities.

The Times has just selected 27 "top" universities arbitrarily. It's not even the Holy Russell Group, which only has 24 members and doesn't include Sussex, which is cited in the bit of the Times article I can see around the edge of the paywall.

My son was there last year ..had to leave ,absolutely no mental health awareness or help from the tutors
His GP signed him off sick ,and the uni made life very very difficult for him.
He then tried to apply to a new uni ,and they took months to forward his grades and do him a personal statement,to the point he missed the application for student finance,and started his new course late .
Utterly disgusted with them ..
Also the uni doctors he signed up to ,took over 3weeks to get back to him ,when he first phoned to say he didn’t feel well mentally.
I had to phone them ,and tell them I was holding them personally responsible if anything happens to him …they phoned him the same day I phoned ,but he had waited 3 weeks for the call by then .
So yeah ,if your teen has possible mental health issues at Warwick ,don’t expect any help or kindness or support

Our local uni is doing face to face tutorials/lab stuff but no large lectures. To be honest as a student who has attended lectures you is usually just sit there and zone out anyway so may as well be tucked up at home zooming anyway.
There’s been a mass exodus of teaching staff in HE across the country. Even with the usual intake getting enough staff to cover F2F teaching is very difficult at the moment. Yes they should recruit but it’s easier said than done to find good academics willing to teach with experience to hit the ground running.
When you turn university into a consumer product with people paying such a high price for fees the dynamic shifts a lot. The expectations of students is sky high compared to the olden days. I feel for academic staff it’s unbelievably stressful.

Within a university there are a limited number of rooms that can accommodate 6 or 8 or 9 people in a tutorial with social distancing. University teaching rooms were simply not built with this in mind.

That means that departments have to either:
a) teach in much smaller tutorial groups to allow them to use a wider range of rooms, but they need to have the staff numbers to teach these extra tutorial groups (plus the additional students who they have had to take due to the exams fiasco this year), or
b) use the limited number of rooms suitable for teaching their current tutorial sizes, but due to their limited availability (and possibly the need to share them with other departments and include the extra students), students use them on a rotating basis, e.g. they get a tutorial in that room every other week and on the alternate weeks they do their tutorial online while others use the room. Teaching online is still teaching.

The university has conducted a survey of every room they own or that they could gain access to. There are already plans to co-opt the conference facilities, and create teaching spaces from social spaces and, in some cases, the open-plan offices of staff who can be made to work from home.

As was the case last year, rooms that can be used will be used, the majority of teaching staff will increase their teaching hours and everyone will do their best. If students are unhappy with that, there are formal complaints procedures for them to follow both within the university and externally with the OIA.

My ds graduated from Warwick in June and was really disappointed with years two and three. He expected exams at the end of year 2 to be a little disorganised due to the pandemic, but year three was even worse: during his finals the exam portal crashed three times, a mid term exam had to be cancelled as half the students could not access it, courses with professional exam exemptions were no longer suitable for exemption as the uni changed the assessment from exam to essay without informing students.

DS is about to start 2nd year maths at Warwick. Lectures will be 100% online. No change from his first year. Seemingly no blended learning. He's very frustrated. And we are frankly shocked. Initially thought he would stay and do a masters at Warwick but we are encouraging him to leave and do his 4th year at a university that has genuinely tried to do some f2f teaching - and frankly has better social life (eg. Imperial, Oxford - or elsewhere).

Now I read lecturers are considering strike action. Honestly, I'm not sure anyone will notice. Many of last years online lectures were prerecorded - and will just be rerun this year.

Surely the real kicker here is the incredible lack of labs, I think I could live with lectures online and blended tutorials but labs are so crucial to understanding the content of the other bits.... How can they only have 6 labs a year?! I remember one particularly brutal semester (not at Warwick) where we had 6 half day labs in a week, every week!
You're not telling me that social distancing and over-recruitment can account for them getting the lab time they would/should normally get in a fortnight, say? So right to be angry OP and good luck in pursuing it, I would definitely be focussing on the maths/logistics of such a dramatic reduction in lab time as I really can't see how they could justify that.