Online lectures - good or bad?

[breeze77]

Hi there,
we went to the Aberystwyth open day yesterday and were really disappointed to hear that the English lectures are all online. The seminars for the lectures are in person so they do have contact hours there, but all actual lectures are virtual.
This felt like a bit of a red flag for me but they were selling it as if it was no problem at all, a positive part of the experience and the future of lectures.
So I was just wondering if anyone has any experience of this way of doing things and what your thoughts are?

My university employs a team of mental health nurses.

We have a significant number of counsellors working on campus offering MH support, and student health services offer a wide range of services targeted at the student population, but are not a GP service.

As someone who was at uni through covid - I'd be wanting to know what format the online lectures were going to be.

Accessing something that's been custom recorded to be online, broken up into 20 minute or so chunks (which our staff used to do for ease of watching back and in case Panopto ate a longer recording) without background noise etc... more acceptable than the "whack an in-lecture-theatre recording up from 2 years ago complete with background noise, sirens going past outside, and Katie telling her mates in the second row about the boy she copped off with last night" approach some of our modules saddled us with. I really really begrudged paying for the second type of "content".

I'll be honest though - I was a mature student on a career-oriented degree - very very high on the drive and motivation stakes of things to stay focused - and getting up on a morning and just having a list of recordings to sit through and stay focused with - it almost broke me. It's lonely, it's soul destroying and there's no interaction with peers before and after the session - and it's incredibly easy to just fall behind on your "watch list". At the point we did it as well - the uni technology wasn't quite there, so there'd be a pledge all the next week's content would be up by 3pm on a Thursday, and by 3.01 pm you had about five emails that uploads had failed and stuff would be delayed, and the VLE had crashed.

Our cohort had a massive drop out rate in that year of largely online (and we were allowed some face to face because of the course it was).

You might want to look more carefully at where the funding for student health services comes from. That they are provided under the university banner does not mean they are private services rather than NHS.

I’m not in the UK. I can assure you that the services I’m talking about are not publicly-funded.