UKH

I work at a University, at least virtually : )

I've been asking with increasing insistence over the last couple of weeks "So, what's going to happen in September, are we really going to see hundreds of thousands of students pack their lives into the back of mum and dad's car and journey forth to a new city to start a new life in shared accommodation, in crowded lecture halls and laboratories?".

I've had a lot of "Mmmm" back but no sign that my university is giving this proper consideration.  We've got a massive focus on keeping recruitment activities for 2020/2021 going, but nothing has slipped out from senior management about what the start of the next academic year might look like.

I appreciate that most UK Universities are staring into a budgetary black pit, and the financial life raft for many of them is student fees for next year.  I think it's clear that the international students we have been desperately recruiting for the last number of years will not be coming.  I'm aware that all staff have been working overtime to focus on the immediate firefighting of closing campuses down, and on how we are going to graduate this year's finalists from their frankly abysmal year of industrial action and pandemic and so the short/medium term of what happens next may not have been the number one priority yet, but it's coming down the track very very fast.

So what could happen?  A friend who works in finance at a different university told me that they were considering a January start to the year, or just wiping the entire year.  This seems so drastic that I can't really get my head round it, yet we live in very strange times where the unthinkable is commonplace.

Some subjects lend themselves to online learning better than others, perhaps there could be a faculty by faculty approach with different faculties doing different things?

I should make it clear I am talking about teaching here, research is a whole different red hot potato.

I know many other UKCers work in universities so can anyone report back on what your institutions plans are or on what your thoughts are for the future?

Hard to blame them for not releasing a plan for September when the government can't even indicate where they expect us to be in three weeks.

I’m sure that in no cases will senior management use the crisis as an opportunity to activate long standing plans to privatise (another) part of their provision of higher education through a for-profit corporation, whilst pretending they’re taking action to safeguard jobs and without having any sort of credible business case for the change. As this won’t happen, there can be no question of behind-the-scenes conflicts of interest.  If it were to happen I am sure it would do so with full consultation from the start involving staff and students alike.

Quite a few places have gone on recent debt fuelled expansion plans with international (predominantly Chinese) student fees covering the debt repayments on loans of up to the order of £1Bm.  I always thought this was bonkers as China is clearly growing capacity at home and will stop its kids going to countries with a free press just as soon as it can educate them as well back home.  I thought it would be politics not a pandemic that derailed the gravy train, but here we are.

One thing you can almost certainly guarantee is that the staff in teaching departments will be flogging themselves to make it all work out for their students despite the strained living and working arrangements of lockdown.

Many universities will have staff who senior management call “world leaders in their field” in their marketing material but who they haven’t consulted over the pandemic.  Institutions where this has belatedly happened are aware of the range of possibilities - hopefully student residence will be allowed by Sep/Oct 2020, but the next 12-18 months could be subject to more lockdown/ at any point, so a pre-prepared ability to do remote teaching and learning seems eminently sensible.  I say “range of possibilities” as nobody can predict the future here, including government.

Absolutely, and I am certainly not blaming anyone or expecting a fully fledged plan at this point, and apologise if I expressed myself poorly.  I'm trying to sound out what opinions and possible options are being discussed at other institutions.  

The government has told us where they expect us to be in three weeks time though - at home ; )

For sure I know this!  This is not going to be a lazy summer.  I worry about how long colleagues can sustain the current level of effort, but if it's do or die for the instution then the pressure to deliver *something* is going to be huge.

Of course we don't know what's going to happen yet, and I suspect we'll end up at least discussing plans for several different scenarios. Our School and Faculty plans are just starting to turn to the medium term now we've flogged ourselves to sort out the current academic year. Some form of mixed / blended learning is one possibility where socially distancing small group teaching supports online lectures to avoid large packed lecture theatres,  but we all know the potential for future lockdowns.

St Andrews and Durham have released some plans, but the former is hardly representative of the sector given its highly international UG cohort, and Durham has come under fire for its plans. I don't see the UK sector moving to distance learning en masse,  we simply don't have the resources to do this, and I think it's unlikely to be popular with young people who want the traditional university, living away from home etc, experience. 

My School has BA programmes which are rather more easily manageable remotely than our BSc programmes which require hands on lab work.

And yes, it may be possible to start some programmes in Jan 21, esp PGT programmes with mainly international students, but UG schemes of largely home students? I'd have thought nowhere would really want to postpone those if it can be avoided.

Thanks Kate.  Exactly the sort of thing I was after.  Interesting to read Durham's plans and that's exactly what I can see us being asked to get up and running over the handful of months between now and September.

We can socially distance small group teaching, and put lectures online (a small sentence encompassing an absolute mountain of work).  But how can we socially distance halls? Or the union...or the gym? Or the labs, as you highlighted - we are a science department.

Well bedtime now, and back tomorrow for another day of this neverending nightmare.

I was surprised to hear Michaelmas being shifted to January mooted as one of a limited number of options here.  The only others are business as usual or online teaching.  The more traditional we are, the less positively online learning is viewed.  Easter terms is going ahead online and my gut feeling s business as usual for an October start.  But maybe reduced numbers.

I expect nothing more definite than that as nobody really knows what the UK and the world will be like in 5 months.

Excellent post (OP), thread, points, and questions. Thank you. While the whole UK might be in ongoing economic trouble, we also have to consider universities (an important part of the UK economy) and their teaching and research..... some of them were in trouble or on thin ice last September, and they are going to be in a lot more trouble in September this year. I wonder how many Chinese students are making plans right now to come and study or research in the UK this year? What's the number? It's easy to guess. (And not only Chinese. Large numbers of other nationalities come, e.g. from South Korea). And their absence this year will not only affect the bottom line and other lines of the UK universities themselves, but the wider UK economy e.g. in UK university towns and cities, which would have relied on the presence of those Chinese students

Can I suggest to those interested that we also spare a thought for the universities in many, many other countries which are also likely to take a massive hit in 2020, thanks

I'm not at a Uni, but a prep school in MA. We're hearing the same from some colleges. We deal a lot with recruitment teams. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/12/boston-university-plans-poss...

We are planning on a September start but that is very in the air. We will just teach remotely and not delay.

Re Chinese students, we took a massive hit this year when the company who went between the Chinese students and us went out of business, without paying us. We've honored their education but lost pushing a million dollars suposedly ($40,000 a year tuition), on top of that students have been returning to China early because their parents think it safer there now. We're not sure how many we will lose but they are a big part of our business model.

I would imagine that a lot of school leavers and their parents will be thinking:  "F*ck it.  Take a year out, it's too risky and it is too much money when they can't provide the full service."   Especially for courses like medicine or nursing where there's also a risk aspect.

Good question and I suspect the answer is nobody knows.

There are differences across disciplines and also in terms of what courses students are doing. A one year master's is a different proposition to a three year or more bachelor's programme some of which will be half way through right now. Some subjects could be delivered online up to a point (MOOCs never really took off did they) some clearly can't. 

I can confirm the epic struggle to get this year through but how that translates to next year its hard to tell. Scraping through one year through online teaching and supervision and adapting assessment is one thing as it is a response to a unique situation. I don't get the sense that this could form the basis of delivering a whole programme next year. Personally, I'm fortunate enough to be a bit distant from this at the moment as I have a couple of years away from teaching to do research but I know my colleagues are working really hard to get this year's cohort through and ensure they get their qualifications.

Maybe a year's pause is the best idea but that is going to be a difficult call to make until closer to September. If things are returning to some sort of normality then maybe it would just be a bit of a strange year with fewer students. If not then many parts of academic life are hard to envisage given that the start of term or an academic conference seems to be a textbook example of a super spreader event.

It would be nice to think that UUK is looking to develop a coordinated response but from what little knowledge I have of them through the whole pensions debacle I'm not confident that would be the case. It seems more likely that once a few universities break and start cancelling than the others will follow suit.

The financial black hole really depends on whether it is a one year blip or the start of a wider shift. If it is the former it may be a little uncomfortable for some of the universities on tighter margins but the older bigger ones have the sort of asset base that will enable them to ride it out. These big expansion projects are long term and meant to be paid off over very long periods so a big fall in revenues for a single year shouldn't derail them (whether the financial planning and logic behind them is as strong as it should be is something we are about to find out). 

If we are looking at more of a structural shift or a longer lasting problem then I think its a very different picture and will come down to how much higher education is seen as a route out of the crisis, how much government is prepared to support the sector and whether the sort of hyper-globalised undertakings that modern universities are are still viable.

One thing you didn't mention in the OP is the whole casualisation of academia which is an area which was contentious before all of this and already seems to be hit quite hard with temporary contracts being cancelled etc. My experience is that a lot of this is in support of the high student numbers but if those numbers aren't there then much of this will fall back on those of us lucky enough to have permanent contracts. I do feel for the people that aren't.

Rumours are that we will have to have prepped on line and face to face forms of delivery. They are write different if you Di them properly. We won't have time to Di this. 

We've also been told we may be doing a 3 eek extended induction to civet material with students going into year 2 from year 1 and year 1 from foundation years.

I have no idea what will actually happen. Still trying to figure out what we're doing now. But I with two kids not at school   I'm spending most of the day helping their learning, grabbing the odd hour here and there for meetings and a very small quantity of work. 

They've got 5 months to remodel themselves more akin to the OU. 

The bonus could be the reduced fees for the students. 

Remote learning isn't  cheaper if done well. And most students struggle without the social side of university, so unlikely Inwould say. Although that's not to say there wont be radical long term change 

Ahhh, it seems so obvious when you say it like that! 

Given the profession of most of those posting in this thread though I think you meant to say "You've got 5 months to remodel yourselves more akin to the OU."

True and the ou courses are arguably top notch, I didn't say free but it will be cheaper than £9k. 

Ah bless, That's tough, in a post covid19 world lots will change for everyone.

Unless it's you personally in charge of restructuring high education 'they' is still appropriate. 

Apologies if you are the Minister for Education. 

You realise what the OU charge? 

It's not a trite comment. Social interaction is fundamental to learning effectively, lack of it is why MOOCs largely failed. 

Students do half of naff-all in the first semester of the first year.  I'm sure they could do it as distance learning as an introduction to the course.

It's based on roughly £5K/year for a full time course equivalent of modules, isn't it?

A bit more. It is less than most, but you get less too in terms of facilities. 

You would certainly hope so.  If an institution was so financially exposed by their expansion debt that it faced ruin, you might hope the senior management who got it there would consider significant pay cuts in recognition of their failure.

Where the fall in revenue is Chinese students, I wonder if it will ever come back.  China can’t be very happy having their future leaders spend a year with unfettered access fo a free press.  A few things lately have made me think that/ponder if Chinese students know of suspect that some fraction of their cohort are MSS informants.  China have been sending staff to western universities for 15 years then offering them big grants and labs to do research and westernise research thinking back home.  At some point their university system is big enough and suitable enough that they can keep their students inside their firewall and their cash inside their borders (estimate £10 Bn year flows to the UK, USA and Europe).  At ~£20,000 fees and residence fees per Chinese student this could be a seismic change for some.

Back to the OP’s question: One possibility discussed is moving all lab components of the year into term 2 on the - perhaps optimistic - assumption things will be more normal on 2021.

My preference was to call a year out for A-levels and uni new intake, set up a young person’s volunteering scheme between sixth form and uni.  This would break the sillyness of making offers on predicted grades - which consumes hundreds of academic FTEs each year in modelling and optimisation and game playing - and I suspect a volunteer army could come in useful the next year.  We’d keep that new year delaying uni permanently and the gap in uni intake would give the sector breathing room to look after all existing students better in an exceptionally difficult time.  Gov would need to pick up a few billion in costs for the universities from the gap.

Yeah I've done loads of them. From the  90s when they were just £300-400 a year for a 60 point course, up to being a couple of grand now depending on subject. 

Yes. But life has changed globally. As much as the little darlings need to party, we can't rewind the clock back. We will all need to adapt. 

Plus some UK universities now have sites in China? We've taken the university to them! 

Short summary:

Enormous questions over residences.
Institutions need to be prepared for more lockdowns, perhaps region specific, and so need a strategy for how to deal with these.
How possible or desirable is the solution "Just deliver the content remotely"? What about subjects that have to deliver practicals?
Large lectures seem to be an obvious no-no, staff will need to become expert in delivering live online lectures, or pre-recorded online lectures.  Timetabling, training and equipment implications.
Will students want to come back, will they just stay away for a year? Would you pay your £9,000 fees now or wait till the situation has stabilised?  What are deferal numbers like?
When might we start to hear from UUK/UCAS (way after we need to I suspect, as understandably they will wait for the government to give them a steer)?
The financial reliance on international students is going to hit some subjects and some institutions much harder than others (Economics and Finance have ballooned in my institution in recent years to lectures of hundreds of students that have to be double taught).
There are severe implications for the staff who are on temporary contracts who have been recruited specifically to deal with the numbers above.
Dave B is preparing with a "3 eek extended induction to civet material" LOL, that's a new one on me Dave :  )

Well that's a short list from the responses up to about fifteen minutes ago.  Glad to have thrashed that out, now I can really get my teeth into something meaty when I arrive at my desk on Monday morning *sobs quietly into his morning coffee"
 

But human nature hasnt. Im not talking about parties but the interactive nature or learning. Carefully designed online content can replicate this a bit, but not very effectively. 

True. But just a work places will need to adapt at least in the near term, so will education. 

Summo with the greatest of respect either engage constructively and politely or p*ss off out of the thread.

What do you mean 5 months! Term started April 6, we have moved everything online with immediate effect. I have been lucky with most things I need to do being in early May.

Particularly for small group teaching, other roles such as student support, individual and meaningful feedback (particularly the recognition of critical holes in knowledge) are much more time consuming and awkward on line. For some sessions we have doubled the staff so I am not sure that courses will end up cheaper, particularly if there is a need for increased IT infrastructure as well. Teaching should not just be about shovelling information into people by the cheapest means.  

The median age in the OU is 28, only 25% undergrads under 25. It’s an absolutely brilliant resource for mostly mature students with a certain level of life skills. However the typical UG needs something entirely different, and MOOCS have shown that for most people, unlike attendance learning, even if it’s brilliantly put together, doesn’t have the best outcomes. Although the content is obviously important, the other key outcome of an UG degree is ‘learning how to learn’, which is mostly gained socially.

Overseas numbers will obviously drop. This doesn’t affect the post-92s as much as the Russell Group, as overseas students tend to choose their destination based on Times Higher rankings. However, the RG universities have large endowments and war chests to weather these storms. 
I would expect teaching to resume for the Autumn semester this year across the sector. However, there are going to be losses and realignments, and potentially UK UG student numbers trending back to pre 92 numbers and destinations, and a lot more heading for a vocational route.

Yes, age, experience, maturity is factor. Perhaps A level format needs to change more to develop those self learning skills? Rather than a big leap from one style of learning to another? 

You asked for a viewpoint, I gave you mine. Then instead of replying relevant to the topic you decided to be grammar pedant. I'd suggest you follow your own advice. 

Scottish universities might suffer differently as they need fee paying students to balance the books, whilst not charging Scottish students. 

I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.  Perhaps fees could also return to more sensible levels if that happened.

And the students who already started their degree and should be continuing in September having missed March to June?

That's altogether more difficult, and may well depend on the degree.  I can see no reason you couldn't deliver a semester of a Computer Science degree entirely remotely but still on the traditional contact model including lectures, projects etc, and that may be no bad thing as it'd prepare people for how a big chunk of the IT industry actually works.  But if you're going to be doing a more practical subject that isn't going to work.  There will probably need to be per-university and per-course decisions on this sort of thing.

Potentially, for example, you've got the opportunity to use the long summer holiday for some teaching.

An interesting question.

I have recently graduated from the OU and had considered doing a masters at Manchester uni, because of the potential for social interaction and there is a bus there from pretty much my front door.

However I had decided that at 57, that I would prefer to spend the next 1 or 2 years climbing and travelling, but now think that unlikely because of the plague.

Therefore as my area of study is environmental geography and the next few months or years are going to be fascinating from that perspective, I was going to start making some phone calls regarding the masters on Monday, so I will watch with interest.

We’re gearing up for remote teaching and remote examination in the term starting imminently.  Many other places are too.  It’s a lot of disruption for the students coming on top of significant industrial action.  Can’t be avoided but for the finalists in particular its a lot to take, having all this uncertainty whilst their job offers evaporate.  

The OU model still depends on bringing students together albeit for short intensive periods, hardly a solution.

It just requires work in terms of where you run it, number of students and spacing. Plus these can be later in the course or year, so it buys you time to develop plans, or for the virus to diminish. 

The goal must be about commencing a level of education or business, whilst we move towards a more permanent solution (vaccine, herd immunity etc). It won't be perfect, but it's better than nothing. 

Yeah, those long summer holidays in with nothing to do but;

• Go to conferences to share knowledge and find out what's going on in my discipline
• Conduct and write up research
• Write and review papers
• Apply for funding
• Still supervise dissertation's and PhD's as well as remarking the students who failed last year

Universities aren't just glorified schools teaching is a fraction of what we do but when it works well it combines with and is informed by research. 

I think the universities need to consider what a business would do to stay afloat etc. They'd restructure to suit the new environment, home working, redesign office or factory floors, face to face meetings or conferences go virtual.. etc. 

This is precisely what millions of businesses are doing globally right now so they can still operate. Reading some comments here I get a vibe that isn't the kind of flexible thinking that is occurring amongst many education establishments. The rules are being rewritten, adapt or die. 

Is that the faint sound of violins I hear in the back ground? 

An interesting thread - and from a different perspective, the current Mrs W works in Student Finance (specifically putting together assistance packages for disabled students / those with additional needs). Its businss as usual; she and her team are preparing support packages for 2020/21 academic year as normal. Grants / fees etc are being processed as normal for this coming term, and they have had no indication from anywhere to suggest anything will be different come october.

Yes, this.  It's inconvenient, but that's life.  Sometimes life is a bit inconvenient.

No, it’s the sound of people whose contractual duties extend far beyond undergraduate teaching, and who are increasingly over worked to the detriment of the quality of their work on all fronts, including undergraduate teaching.  Unlike school teachers, university teachers are expected to do many other wildly different roles and the summer is not a “holiday”, it’s the ever shrinking period they get time to focus on those other roles.  

Nobody I know is questioning that there has to be a shift in the focus over the summer to prepare for lockdown at any point in the next teaching year.  But that comes at a cost of every other part of the system, and there’s not been so much discussion on how that’s going to play out - especially as career decisions (probation and promotion) are strongly linked to non-teaching roles at many places.

Heaven and earth is being moved to support the undergrads in anticipation of what the next 3- and 18-month periods could encompass.  But the idea that the summer was ever a “holidaY” grossly misrepresents how busy a time it is and how much work is being pushed down the line - often to personal detriment - to make it work for the students.  This isn’t exceptional - it’s adapt or die for most large organisations - but it’s a myth that there is a “summer holiday” in the university sector.

So in the last few weeks the entire educational model has been redesigned, assessment has been moved online, recruitment changed so A levels arebt needed, university finances restructured, plans are now being developed for teaching from the summer, research has been reditected to fighting coronavirus within weeks, thousands of students who are stranded have been accommodated, and from that your conclusion is that there is no flexible thinking! 

Lets be realistic.  We say we teach for three terms.  But in most cases Easter Term is virtually non-existent.  Students typically get about 20 weeks of actual teaching and in most of the social sciences that also amounts to less than ten hours a week.

Covid19 might be the tree-shake necessary to discourage unnecessary and drawn-out education which can be undertaken in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, without the built-up bureaucracy typical of publicly funded institutions

What do you think it's like for the self employed or small business owners? Desperately trying to stay afloat and secure the jobs of their employees. Change is unavoidable. 

I wasn't suggesting education is a long holiday.. 15 fully paid weeks off per year etc.  But having to work 47 or 48 weeks of the year; isn't that what everyone else does anyway. 

And no one is suggesting otherwise. However, it is clear from your posts you have very little idea of what happens in universities, or of teaching so dont be surprised whe  people point out your suggestions wont work. Its not resistance to change but you are hearing but resistance to ineffective change.

To add: on this thread - there certainly is resistance to change in universities generally which isn't helpful. 

That’s certainly a good point. There’s a whole lot of self reliance and management required above and beyond what’s experienced at A level. I think supporting this transition is vital irrespective of delivery style.

Exactly.  Which is why it’s difficult to do much teaching over the summer - as the time is already fully to bursting with other work.  Some can be kicked down the line more safely than others.  It’s the PhD students who are going to get the rotten end of the stick I suspect.

I was only referring to it being a holiday for undergraduates (which it is), not with regard to staff who would need other duties reorganising, obviously.

It is likely our undergrads won’t be doing whatever they had previously planned over the summer...

Exactly, so that's time that could be used in a different way, potentially.  Doesn't have to be traditional lectures, it could be self-led project work of some kind.  Or if lectures are relevant, record them and they can be delivered and received at different times convenient to the individual.

My point is yes the education standard or quality may suffer a little, it will likely be inconvenient at times(for staff and students), it may challenge many staff whose habits are some what engrained or institutionalised, but there is no alternative.  

If this runs on for a year or two, what methods are employed in sept20 might be revised by Easter 21, or even in sept21. There isn't likely to be a perfect nor immediate solution, in any industry or sector. 

This has been happening for around five years now in most places.

Non university future employment options will have disappeared anyway, so it might have less impact than envisaged. There just might not be any new PhD students. 

I am research only these days, my Institute has reinvented itself as a design and rapid production facility for PPE and ventilator components for the NHS. I scooted in on the last day before lockdown (only rapid prototyping people allowed in the building afterwards), and filled the boot of my car with as much kit from my lab as possible. So business as usual from my home lab now. More difficult if your day to day involves electron microscope or Mass Spec. As far as I can see, we’re going to introduce a managed phased reopening of labs as soon as lockdown is relaxed. There are a reasonable chunk of Unis where research income is significant, and as far as I can see, this is remaining buoyant.
i agree with you that adaptation to a new world is vital. I think that’s been coming to Universities for quite a while, irrespective of the virus.

I only have August off from teaching, so you are right for some, but we are full on 5 days a week until the beginning of August. The effort is very much here and now with things needing to be changed radically with the idea that we will be allowed direct student contact later in the year. Let hope we all get it right.

Wish I could type. 

3 week extended induction to cover material missed in semester 2

Education is not the only sector about to see seismic shift. I'm not convinced the UK fibre or 4/5g network is upto the task either. 

It's struggling a bit under the load of everyone using video and streaming Netflix at 4K, but in reality you don't need video for most things, in work we barely ever use it other than screensharing, which because not much changes is very low-bandwidth.  We used to do it using NetMeeting with 56K modem connections!

True. But some students who live rurally could just dream of having a connection that reliably streams anything, never mind allows say a parent to homework and them to study. 

My son is struggling to source uranium for his PhD research. Apparently the lead boxes are too heavy for the drivers to handle.

I've been teaching online using blackboard collaborate ultra. It's nothing like teaching in a room. Even with a Microsoft surface so I can write on it and a big monitor attached, it's not easy. I'm doing  1:1 meetings with students using Microsoft Teams, but this takes  longer too. In terms of some tech we were set up before the lockdown. Lecture capture using Yuja,though this is not great as uploads take too long on my Internet. It fails. It might work once the broadband is upgraded. We'll see. 

Attendance is weak. I suspect many students I teach are struggling hugely. 

Students are having tech issues (surprisingly) and (again surprisingly) many do not have the it infrastructure to support learning this way. I teach computing subjects.

Many are supporting siblings at school, and some are now sofa surfing at parents owing to lack of space.

Pity some other areas where neither the staff or students are as adept. 

The telecoms infrastructure is fine, the  only change is the evening peak now starts in the afternoon but capacity not exceeded.

The company/university in-house or out sourced cloud infrastructure and domestic router may struggle.

Indeed.  But there are ways to work around that.  For example allow lectures to be downloaded rather than just streamed, so you can download overnight, and for tutor group meetings use a conferencing service that can also be dialed into with a conventional telephone (which is what we did years ago before IP conferencing became a thing) - send the slides out and they can step through them alongside that.

This is all stuff the IT industry did before things (re remote working) were quite as easy as now

Or like the old OU lessons on bbc2 at night! 

It’s not a holiday for my undergrads, although I accept that they are unusual

Haha, thanks for the clarification, that's much more helpful but far less interesting than what you originally wrote : )

The focus is very much on the immediate. Next term's teaching has all gone online. As a practical subject, huge amounts of effort have gone into providing alternative teaching for projects, field trips, practical classes. Masters courses run through the entire calendar year and a lot of effort has gone into transitioning them as well. Meeting all students as groups and 1:1 to help them through the process.

Understandably, this is all very reactive. Our place (city-redbrick-Russell group) hasn't really said much about the new term, but finances are going to be very tight. Anything that wasn't signed and sealed is being cut. Along with others I'm frustrated at the lack of clarity, but I don't think anyone knows how the next month or so will pan out.

Research can continue for a while (we were only half-joking in Jan that a lockdown was the only way we stood a chance of catching up with workloads) but after a while, things will grind to a halt. Access to the labs and specialised equipment is vital  - there's a few months of data analysis to do, but we are then lagging behind.

Everyone is putting in huge amounts of effort to support the students. At the same time, compared to the heroics in the NHS, we have it very easy.

re: the suggestion that those due to start at university in the autumn could defer til the following year and do voluntary work. There may be something to that, but...

The current school leavers will have had no in-school education since March and won't have had that final time to work on independent learning-skills in the run up to preparing & revising for A levels. Yes, I know they're still having work to do from their schools and teachers, but we know that the level of engagement with that will be spotty. There is already in Wales a project being set upon to ease the transition of these Y13 students to university because everyone knows it's going to be a lot harder this year. If those students all have a year out, by the time they start their studies it'll have been 18 months since they had any formal education and they will struggle in much more substantial numbers and more extensively than a usual cohort. They will be more likely to struggle to engage and more likely to drop out.

It would also be likely to discriminate against school-leavers from lower-income households and with no family tradition of HE. I am very aware that the job market is going to be horrendous for a long time after this, but lower-income households are going to be far less able to sustain a non-earner waiting over a year to go to university, and that momentum of staying in education moving from school to FE or HE will go. That will impact most the very groups in our society whom we need to support.

We've sprawled out a bit from an original fairly sharp focus of "What are Universities planning for September?" to a much broader but still very interesting discussion, about this being a stimulus for the entire Higher Education model to be radically overhauled.  

To get back to the point though:
Interesting to hear Dave B's comment above about having a 3 week extended induction for returning students to cover material missed this year.   Another 'little job' for the Directors of Study, or whatever they are called in various other institutions, to get on with over that summer 'holiday'.

If anyone else wants to chip in with ideas of diktats from their institution please do so, to keep things focussed I would be grateful if we could try to limit discussion to the short/medium term rather than the bigger picture else the nuggets of gold are harder to find : )

This is interesting.  I'd assume though the the cleaning up in the student finance system will happen after the universities work out what they are going to do?  I'd think somewhere in the food chain plans are being discussed for what happens if this year does not proceed as usual but perhaps like universities it's too soon after the initial derailment of normal life for this to be more than question marks in peoples' heads.

My son had just accepted an offer of a funded PhD in Applied Maths starting in September before all this kicked off. Really worried that funds will no longer be available. 

I’d been imagining something with a bursary and that focuses around self-led development and independence which addresses some of your points - in my mind was how differently mature students with experience of standing on their own feet engage with undergraduate studies, often to their benefit.  You’re right about it changing how students may adapt to university study, and you raise an excellent point about how it’s likely to be much more difficult for the Oct 2020 intake given their time out of the classroom.  I hadn’t thought about that and now that I do, it’s not filling me with positivity.  

At our place anything with a signed contract is being honoured - anything else not.

Nor sure where your facts are coming from ref the OU. I worked for student finance and the bulk of students I spoke to were not impressed with quality of teaching, and they were charging the same fees as the attended universities.

The OU do not charge the same fees as the attended universities.  It's still a hefty whack but it's much less than the near standard 9ish grand.

Teaching quality varies, but it does at even a red-brick too.  (I've done both so I feel in a reasonable position to compare).

Maybe it will be a good opportunity to sack of all the rubbish courses like a Star Wars studies and focus on real education that stands people in good stead for real jobs in the real world? 
 

Just a thought

It would be really good if this thread- which is generally very sensible and helpful - didn't get side-tracked by one of those 'close down mickey mouse degrees' discussions.

If courses close or universities go bust because of this, it will almost certainly have a disproportionate impact on those from lower-income households and little tradition of going on to FE and HE that I was talking about earlier. That would be a bad thing.

My info is out of date which I should have taken account of as I left sfe 6 years ago, some of the OU courses back then were 9k. good they have reduced them. I always wanted to study at OU before the 2012 regs came out, but eventually applied to a red brink uni. 

Degree's are more than the topic, its the analysis and critical skills learnt that are the value of a degree. IMO. I studied animation and visual effects so I can work on Star Wars. I was applying to ILM's jedi academy this year, but shit happened. 

How is that so?  My impression is that a lot of people doing the mickey-mouse degrees, at mickey-mouse universities, are themselves from lower-income backgrounds.  These same people are accruing massive debt (or debt that will ultimately become tax-payer debt) for little gain, losing 3-4 years of work experience, or 3-4 years that could be spent travelling the world for the same cost, all in the mistaken belief their degree will make them more employable.  Or, in the mistaken belief that 3-4 years are needed to read texts or attend classes that could be undertaken in one or two years.

Covid19 and the impact it will likely have on HE very much re-opens that hole discussion.  It is impossible to avoid.

First world problems.

Could always try the Libyans.

youtube.com/watch?v=K_N_xCHjFR4&

Thanks! Eased my mind a bit.

http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding

For an undergraduate degree it's about £6K-and-a-bit per year - two 60 credit modules in a year is considered full-time equivalent (as that will get you an undergraduate honours degree in 3 years), the modules are much larger and much "beefier" than typical modules at traditional universities.  I'm not aware of it ever having been any different - I believe they started at £5K when "full fat" fees came along and have slowly bumped it up each year by inflation or thereabouts.

I don't know about postgrad, PhD etc as I've not done those, I've got 2 undergrad degrees, one from Manchester (Computer Science with German) and one from the OU (Open Degree, but primarily engineering oriented).  Not for any reason of needing that, more for self-improvement etc.

It’s the Mickey mouse courses that are the downfall of university standards in my opinion. If they catered for real world jobs and requirements  then a disproportionate amount of students would not be leaving university with a huge amount of debt and poor employment prospects. I suspect many of them would also come from households with little tradition of attending university and attracted there by the false promise of degrees helping employment and student loans and grants to delay the inevitable poorly paid jobs. 

The other problem is having the uranium delivered to his girlfriend’s parents where he’s WFH. 

I'm really quite surprised there hasn't been a big solicitor fuelled miss-selling scandal over this going back to at least 2003.  

You may be right that we have reached the zenith of university attendance. It's become a marketplace, with fewer controls on numbers at particulariinstitutions than there used to be. 

I have no idea what you are envisaging as mickey mouse subjects. But all the subjects my colleagues teach are rigorous, teach real world skills... If nothing else, deeper thinking skills through a particular vehicle. It can be thought by some, especially science/engineering people whose subjects are directly Vocational that the topic area is the learning. It is and it isn't. Those deeper analytical skills are the learning, with a side effect of looking at some area in greater detail. 

I teach computing. You can see the relavance of that. But what would you think if I said that about 40% of my students don't end up working in IT? Waste of time, or do the analysis, algorithmic thinking, team working, ethical discussion makes it worthwhile? 

Then imagine a world without art (from pop literature and trashy films, and high art, classical music and high fashion), without news, and without philosophy...  Its what makes life worth living IMHO. 

I'd rather do without the MsWindows than some of those. University often give the arts space to allow people to develop those.. 

Going on to think about next academic year ,  it's going to be hard for some of the courses to develop learning communities without that face to face initially. I'm not sure how I'll go about virtual ice breakers etc. Any thoughts from other academics of ideas how to go about this? 

Mind you, if that supply of money to the universities was cut off, they would pretty well all go under by Xmas.........

teesside where i am seem to have a money tree, the amount they have spent on new buildings recently,  I hope they have if funding disappears.

Good point about learning communities - it would be extremely difficult to do it on a cohort level. If we're still doing everything remotely in the autumn (god, I hope not!!) then I'd at least start to build a micro learning community of my personal tutees by having group meetings in Learning Central Collaborate or Zoom. I'm not doing any first year teaching next year, or am not supposed to be (whether my secondment replacement will happen now I've no idea), but that's going to be a lot more of a challenge. I've done some online synchronous teaching with my degree level class, but they've been actively learning together since Sept last year so the move to remote learning wasn't so problematic.

I'd already been thinking that with our returning students we'd want to put on some kind of ice-breaker because they'll have been away for so long. We have 2nd and 3rd year students working as mentors with the new first years, and I'd be inclined to do some work with them and our continuing student reps to help the first years 'settle in'.

I didn’t mean their career prospects.   

I think the financial state of many universities is precarious enough that without a government bailout there would be multiple failures before September arrives.  The immediate issues are going to be loss of hall fees for the summer term and conference income over the summer, then the yawning black hole will arrive in the autumn when the overseas students fail to turn up.  

UUK are in discussions with the government for a bailout but there are different problems across the sector.  The large scale teaching intensives are utterly paranoid that the Russell Group will hoover up all the home students to replace the loss of overseas students; for the research intensives now is the moment when the reliance on cross-subsidy from overseas students to research (probably of order £1.5 -£2 billion a year) becomes obvious and untenable.  All this is in an environment when the universities haven't really got a lot of friends in government.

On the other hand, the government still thinks research is important so it won't want to lose the research capacity that the research intensives provide.  My guess is that we'll see a deal where the research intensives get bailed out by a big increase in the research block grant, while student number controls are reintroduced to protect the big teaching intensives and stop big swings in student numbers (the moratorium on unconditional offers is already in place for this reason).  But the government will want their pound of flesh in the shape of a reshaping of the sector, which won't be comfortable.

I suggest he speaks to the post-graduate sub-dean or similar. I am sure it will depend but Interviews for new PhDs are being suspended in some departments here, but existing commitments for September are being met based on a supervisors meeting on Friday.

Indeed; my eldest was at teesside from 2010 to 2012, and he doesn't recognise some of it......he bloody should do though; he was coaching the climbers until a couple of years ago.....

Thanks. It had all been confirmed before lockdown.

Ive just accepted a place on an MSc and have been wondering the same, actually hoping that i can do it remotely, no word from the course leader yet though.

I have just completed the undergrad course with horrific attendance, learning is just so variable. I found i learned the material best with a to-do-list and a stack of books. Now whether first years could manage distance learning from the off? I highly doubt it, so much to figure out in those first few weeks imo.

Well I thought I'd relax from my busy day of desperately trying to firefight virtual assessments, exams and timetabling by summarising this thread for a 'light relief' tangent in our team update tomorrow morning.  Summary is below, I hope it may be helpful for some of you.

Thanks so much to all of you for contributing, even the belligerent* Summo.  I'd welcome any more responses particularly from anyone who is at the front-line/cutting edge of this particular subset of 'things COVID has f*cked up for me'.

Take care everyone.

*War-bearing, I learnt that at University : )

Challenges

• Enormous questions over residences. 
• Institutions need to be prepared for more lockdowns, perhaps region specific, and so need a strategy for how to deal with these. 
• Large lectures seem to be an obvious no-no, staff will need to become expert in delivering live online lectures, or pre-recorded online lectures.  Timetabling, training and equipment implications. 
• Will students want to come back, will they just stay away for a year? Would you pay your £9,000 fees now or wait till the situation has stabilised?  What are deferal numbers like? 
• The financial reliance on international students is going to hit some subjects and some institutions much harder than others (Economics and Finance have ballooned in my institution in recent years to lectures of hundreds of students that have to be double taught). 
• There are severe implications for the staff who are on temporary contracts who have been recruited specifically to deal with the numbers above. 
• Implications for students who do not have access to the technology, or broadband 
• Weak attendance for online learning 
• Concerns about those who are from low income households or households with no tradition of HE – loss of momentum if any time is missed in the transition from school/college to university.
• ‘Transition’ from school/college to HE is going to be even harder than usual for those who have lost the last four months of their pre-university education
• Small group teaching, individual support, meaningful feedback much more awkward and time consuming online 
• Concerns Russell Group will hoover up the home students to top up the hole in their numbers from the missing international students

Solutions

• How possible or desirable is the solution "Just deliver the content remotely"? What about subjects that have to deliver practicals? Durham’s plans condemned: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/17/lecturers-condemn-durham-...
• Why can’t we just all morph into the OU?  Because the OU has a different demographic (tends to be older), for traditional universities social interaction is a fundamental part of the course, both the learning and the social experience,  
• Could we move all lab components into TB2 to enable a later start? 
• 3 week extended induction period in the new year to cover material for returning students that has been missed 
• Focus on developing ‘learning communities’ in the new year, this will be hard for 1st years if they have no initial face to face contact time – ‘virtual ice-breakers’

Other

• When might we start to hear from UUK/UCAS?
• Downwards trend in numbers? 
• Student Finance still processing for a usual September start date, no indication that anything other will happen 

Thanks for the thread and summary, Bobling. One thing in particular struck me in your last post:

This chimes with Richard J's comment at 19:09 last Saturday, "The large scale teaching intensives are utterly paranoid that the Russell Group will hoover up all the home students to replace the loss of overseas students". It seems to me that the over-reliance on overseas students (many from China) to fund UK universities in recent years is now coming home to roost. I think it has been only a short-term solution to increase lecture numbers in order to accommodate the much larger numbers: Chinese students do not want to come to the UK to sit in a lecture hall with 100+ other students: this is very clear from on-line discussions in Chinese inside China (a place with which I am extremely familiar). IMO improving the quality of education in UK universities is more important for long-term survival than quantity

Bobling, I am not in any way criticising you or your institution, but trying to see a way forward for long-term survival for UK universities. Thank you for listening

Open / applicant days are happening now. Virtually. Trying to figure out the tech for doing this and interesting activities for students to do online.

Recruitment next year will be a challenge. Trying to get the next next year's students to interact with institutions. 

The further  rise of the local uni? With travel still interesting, will we see local universities preferred as students will live at home and commute in. Reducing the mix of students, experiences and cultures at a given place. 

You certainly feel it when you’ve moved a couple of hundred lead brick to build some shielding.   Gold is almost twice as dense as lead - that’s one of the big credibility flaws in every gold heist movie going, the idea people can nonchalantly pick up stacks of gold bars or even a single bar.

I think the PhD students are some of the most exposed members of the university system by this crisis; I’ve been surprised the research councils haven’t announced a funding extension yet.

They have - 6 months funded.

https://www.ukri.org/news/government-announces-support-for-phd-students-as-...

Haven't heard of anything specific. I think it will be business as usual unless I am told (like five days before hahaha). But honestly everything seems to be ticking along okish, we just have to make massive allowances with deadlines etc for all students which seems ok and totally justifiable for just about any reason. Worrying is the lack of international travel in the future. Will foreign students be allowed to come ( and this goes not only for new students, but for those who study here in Scotland for four years and had to repatriate home of which I have got very many)?? Who knows.

Wrong, what I said above ,  we won't start til 5th October - news from today- to allow for more preparation. So, couple of weeks longer than normally which is great. International students or none of them basically, are still a worry, though!!

Worth flagging up that PhD students aren’t an homogenous group. The RC funded students mostly in Russell Group Doctoral Training Centres will, as Richard says, get a 6 month extension. I have PhDs who are directly funded by industry. It looks like extensions will be available, however they have access to all their experimental data, and took pcs etc away from the labs, and most are actually spending the time profitably and getting papers out. Most don’t want an extension if they can avoid it,

probably the most exposed are overseas students here on fee waivers and/or self-funding, or funded by their own govts./companies. It’s difficult to get any clarity there at the moment.

What will happen to PhD students who have field work which I imagine is now impossible ? Will they be allowed an extra field season ?

I know I had to have an extra year when bad weather meant I got almost no useful data in my 2nd year, meaning those experiments had to be repeated in year 3 when I had expected to be writing up (forest ecology PhD largely based on outdoor experiments) but that was back in the 1980s when the pressure to finish quickly wasn't as strong as today.

I don’t know the answer to that Doug, not my discipline. In my area, we pre empted the lockdown by ramping up hospital patient studies and MRI scans, so we were drowning in data for the foreseeable future. The labs got emptied of kit so we could build equipment ready for the end of lockdown.

i Skyped with the clinical team I work with, and we’re looking to restart patient studies mid-May now we’ve got a containment and distancing protocol in place.

Heike may I ask which institution you are in?