My college has been sending out updates on its plans for the autumn. None of this is yet public. Like last year it is a mess.
1. There will be no on campus teaching, except for professional courses (medicine, dentistry) and lab practicals.
2. Students taking courses with lab practicals are therefore encouraged to return to campus.
3. To remove confusion all students will be told they are expected to be on campus
4. Large group teaching (lectures) will not take place on campus owing to the impossibility to socially distance
5. Therefore, because moststudents will be on campus (see what I did, there?) we have been asked to make arrangements
6. For example, if we had a class of 200 students, we will be asked to give the lecture five times, to cohorts of 40
7. We are also being asked to think up alternative exercises, particularly tutorials, which can be delivered multiple times to small cohorts.
So the upshot is most students will be on campus.
Large class lectures, which probably contributes 80% of their reason for being on campus, will not take place.
Instead students will receive some small group teaching
This means that staff will have to give the same lecture multiple times
Despite this students will receive fewer total lectures because staff do not have multiple clones and we have ony so many lecture theatres (small group teaching means 40 students in a room that holds 200 to maintain social distancing)
This means a lot of the lectures will, again, be delivered via Teams, Kaltura, etc. Online.
The timetabling turnaround is always tight owing to the mountains of administration associated with timetabling and setting up online coursework submission portals with inbuilt deadlines. This year we have been given till May 20 to finalize timetables. A bit tricky. In my case I have the added problem of finding new lecturerers to replace 6 lost due to a colleague announcing, one week ago, he's retiring. The likely solution is a shell timetable with fake content. Tremendous scenes.
My advice is the same as it was last year. If you kid is doing a degree with large class teaching, and has yet to book accomodation, plan to stay at home till Christmas. If your kid is entering clinical training or is doing something where social distancing will be easy to manage then attending will probably be the better option.
1. There will be no on campus teaching, except for professional courses (medicine, dentistry) and lab practicals.
2. Students taking courses with lab practicals are therefore encouraged to return to campus.
3. To remove confusion all students will be told they are expected to be on campus
4. Large group teaching (lectures) will not take place on campus owing to the impossibility to socially distance
5. Therefore, because moststudents will be on campus (see what I did, there?) we have been asked to make arrangements
6. For example, if we had a class of 200 students, we will be asked to give the lecture five times, to cohorts of 40
7. We are also being asked to think up alternative exercises, particularly tutorials, which can be delivered multiple times to small cohorts.
So the upshot is most students will be on campus.
Large class lectures, which probably contributes 80% of their reason for being on campus, will not take place.
Instead students will receive some small group teaching
This means that staff will have to give the same lecture multiple times
Despite this students will receive fewer total lectures because staff do not have multiple clones and we have ony so many lecture theatres (small group teaching means 40 students in a room that holds 200 to maintain social distancing)
This means a lot of the lectures will, again, be delivered via Teams, Kaltura, etc. Online.
The timetabling turnaround is always tight owing to the mountains of administration associated with timetabling and setting up online coursework submission portals with inbuilt deadlines. This year we have been given till May 20 to finalize timetables. A bit tricky. In my case I have the added problem of finding new lecturerers to replace 6 lost due to a colleague announcing, one week ago, he's retiring. The likely solution is a shell timetable with fake content. Tremendous scenes.
My advice is the same as it was last year. If you kid is doing a degree with large class teaching, and has yet to book accomodation, plan to stay at home till Christmas. If your kid is entering clinical training or is doing something where social distancing will be easy to manage then attending will probably be the better option.