[Help] Return to Uni in lockdown?

Green Cross Code Man said:

IHe rents a flat with another friend.

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Green Cross Code Man said:

Any parents of students here who have returned to uni in the current lockdown?

One of my sons wants to return back to his uni, citing various friends who are back. I know arts and sciences are given dispensation to return to face to face teaching but it seems clear to me that other students are allowed back only in exceptional circumstances, ie. unsuitable learning environment or accommodation, or for reasons of health and safety. The govt repeats this criteria several places but rather unhelpfully, the Dean of his uni has been a bit more vague, mentioning well-being as well.
Now my view is that the instruction is clear to stay put, but he argues that he is suffering mentally and can't study as well here at home. I do agree with that but I don't consider his position as exceptional, merely one replicated by hundreds of thousands of others up and down the country.

I'd be interested in any views, be they from parents or students particularly if you have faced a similar decision.

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Sirnormangall said:

Apparently they’re all going back to party and stuff the lockdown rules.

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Hampster Gull said:

I know this situation is unique, and from what my son says there are plenty of parents not letting their kids go back, but for what it’s worth I think you should treat him as an adult, which at what 18, 19 or so he is, and let him choose. It’s sub optimal either way and I think many are suffering so it would be nice to give them a little control of the situation, however minor

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Green Cross Code Man said:

Yes, well he is. The situation sucks.

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Green Cross Code Man said:

I agree. I have treated him as an adult. I made it clear to him that it is his decision as he is 20, a grown man and now has to take responsibility. However, whilst I have misgivings about him returning in the current situation due to government rules, I cannot morally help him if I conclude that I am in opposition. That gives him a problem as he needs me to take a car full of stuff back with him.

Edit: Since replying to this post I notice there are several people stating similar sentiments to [MENTION=17963]Hampster Gull[/MENTION]. I had never said 'NO' as I would have if he was 14 or something.

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

I'm on the other end of this. My uni (one of the big 3 in London) started dribbling on about getting students back, during last summer, after having initially shifted to online teaching way back last April. This imperative has all come from government. It is a sort of 'policy' to strive to have students on campus and doing things. This is because there is a fear students will demand their fees back (shhh! I'm not supposed to say this!) so, by giving one tutorial a week, rotated among the class so the students go in once every 4 weeks, we can claim we are definitely providing on campus teaching. Oh yes.

During the autumn I was made, by my head of department (for teaching, I have a different one for research - that makes so much sense), to create social distanced lab practicals for the course I run in the Spring. I spent countless hours redoing the time table (which is then uploaded by two separate sets of administrators to create an 'official' timetable and an online coursework submission page that directs marks to a central mark reservoir - it all has to line up). And then there is room bookings, run by a third lot of administrators.

When I spoke to the chief lab tech and the person who manages our animal licences for labs, in early December, they told me to **** off, because it wouldn't work, since the students can't work with living tissue with me standing six feet away. So we scrubbed it and instead I came in for a day to be filmed doing the labs, with a new plan that students would watch the video then come in on 3 occasions in Jan/Feb, in groups of 8 or 9 at a time (instead of 15 occasions in groups of two at a time) and 'do' the practical simply by taking data from a previous experimental record. I had to go through all the time-tabling shit again, but I refused to change the submission deadlines for written work etc.

I did all this before telling my HoD. She was not happy. She started asking me if I could set up a whole lot of different lab practicals that did not require me leaning over students' shoulders. Practicals that did not map to the syllabus. Just so we could say we did do practicals. I said 'I'd think about it' (would I, ****?).

This was late December. On Christmas Eve at 5 pm I got an email from college to say that, alas, there would be no on campus teaching for a bit. 'We will review it at the end of Jan' (that soon changed to the end of Feb). So I switched everything again. Luckily with the filmed practicals I had some contingency.

So term started. All my lectures are pre-recorded. The 'practical' consists of students watching my movie, reading the schedule then having a live session online where I go through a PowerLab recording of a single experiment, then the students do the same. The files are massive and it took me ages to edit them and put them on a sharepoint. Later I gave them all a big excel spreadsheet with class data from a previous year and they analyse and use this in the write up as their 'results'.

They could have done all this from home. A few sensible ones have done just that. One is at home in the West Indies. The hours are a bit weird for her when she is forced to do 'live' tutorials on other courses, but she's OK.

I got a new email last week asking me to invent reasons for on campus sessions from March. This means me changing my timetable (and everything that goes with it) again. I asked 'why are we doing this'. I was told 'to give students a flavour of lab work'. I asked what of they can't come in due to having not returned to London? I was told 'they would not be disadvantaged if they can't do it'. I said if there is no disadvantage to not coming in, why come in. Silence.

This is 110% BULLSHIT and sweaty-handed panic. Students are stuck in flats or halls of residence, pointlessly spending money on rent, in many cases isolated, rarely if ever actually coming on to campus, and if so for bullshit made up exercises, just so we can say we did teach them normally (occasionally).

There is a lot of mental health issues. The completion rate for my first written exercise is at a record low. Students are even failing to submit mitigation requests (for extensions) and will lose marks as a consequence. I sit on the mitigation panel every Wednesday morning and we are inundated.

This is shithousery at its English finest. My 'leaders' are wandering around congratulating one another for their achievements. I have email folders awash with attachments outlining new procedures for this and new protocols for that. We have people in full time employment constantly rewriting rules for social distancing, how many students can be in a room of X proportions, updated on the latest advice from HMG, 'following the science'.

I suggested on NSC last Spring that if you had a kid at uni, the best plan is to defer till 2021-22 beceause there would be nothing of substance on Campus till January 2021 ('semester 2') at the earliest, and if Covid is a seasonal flu, nothing of substance for the entire academic year. Did anyone follow my advice? Hard to do so in the face of the warm wind of bullshit blowing in from HMG, perhaps.

And yet the majority of students are stoic and understanding. At least where I work. And in the sciences. It may be different in humanities at the university of the South Bank etc. Yes, good students, stoic, understanding that in May or June when most are vaccinated and summer is upon us all of this will be essentially over....the students get it, but academic 'leaders' and HMG don't. Who knew?

Sadly our 'government' has been like a teenager who has just discovered online gambling - constantly at it, hedging bets, changing the groundrules in a desperate attempt to achieve the impossible - keeping the spread of Covid down while keeping everything normal. A pefect storm of ****wittery. And where I work, aided and abetted, eagerly, by doe-eyed fools who couldn't strategise a shit let alone deal with the ramifications of Covid.

I'm very sorry for those of you with kids at uni. You have been lied to.

Someone said to me last Spring if we bin a year of uni there will be double the number of students next year, too many bums for the seats. Actually that was before we discovered Kaltura and narrated powerpoints. I expect we could easily mitigate against big classes for a year by doing more online. We already have all our lectures recorded now, with captions, all good quality stuff. In fact I suspect we have been forced, accidentally, into a game change....going to university (certainly for a year at a time) may soon become a thing of the past for many kids, with so much doable online......

For courses with practical work it is different. The medical students and dentists have all been on campus throughout. But even that regime could be edited so all the labwork occurs at once. Anyway, if there are sensible modifications that might be made we can rest assured they won't happen.

Incidentally, I don't know how the vaccination prioritisation is working across the UK, but at my uni anyone can rock up and get vaccinated. No prioritization, and very little ID checking. This isn't properly advertised and there is no guarantee you get a jab the same day you turn up (which is why I haven't gone up to London on the off chance). Students can be jabbed too. Not a lot of people seem to know this.

Best wishes to parents and students

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

I'm on the other end of this. My uni (one of the big 3 in London) started dribbling on about getting students back, during last summer, after having initially shifted to online teaching way back last April. This imperative has all come from government. It is a sort of 'policy' to strive to have students on campus and doing things. This is because there is a fear students will demand their fees back (shhh! I'm not supposed to say this!) so, by giving one tutorial a week, rotated among the class so the students go in once every 4 weeks, we can claim we are definitely providing on campus teaching. Oh yes.

During the autumn I was made, by my head of department (for teaching, I have a different one for research - that makes so much sense), to create social distanced lab practicals for the course I run in the Spring. I spent countless hours redoing the time table (which is then uploaded by two separate sets of administrators to create an 'official' timetable and an online coursework submission page that directs marks to a central mark reservoir - it all has to line up). And then there is room bookings, run by a third lot of administrators.

When I spoke to the chief lab tech and the person who manages our animal licences for labs, in early December, they told me to **** off, because it wouldn't work, since the students can't work with living tissue with me standing six feet away. So we scrubbed it and instead I came in for a day to be filmed doing the labs, with a new plan that students would watch the video then come in on 3 occasions in Jan/Feb, in groups of 8 or 9 at a time (instead of 15 occasions in groups of two at a time) and 'do' the practical simply by taking data from a previous experimental record. I had to go through all the time-tabling shit again, but I refused to change the submission deadlines for written work etc.

I did all this before telling my HoD. She was not happy. She started asking me if I could set up a whole lot of different lab practicals that did not require me leaning over students' shoulders. Practicals that did not map to the syllabus. Just so we could say we did do practicals. I said 'I'd think about it' (would I, ****?).

This was late December. On Christmas Eve at 5 pm I got an email from college to say that, alas, there would be no on campus teaching for a bit. 'We will review it at the end of Jan' (that soon changed to the end of Feb). So I switched everything again. Luckily with the filmed practicals I had some contingency.

So term started. All my lectures are pre-recorded. The 'practical' consists of students watching my movie, reading the schedule then having a live session online where I go through a PowerLab recording of a single experiment, then the students do the same. The files are massive and it took me ages to edit them and put them on a sharepoint. Later I gave them all a big excel spreadsheet with class data from a previous year and they analyse and use this in the write up as their 'results'.

They could have done all this from home. A few sensible ones have done just that. One is at home in the West Indies. The hours are a bit weird for her when she is forced to do 'live' tutorials on other courses, but she's OK.

I got a new email last week asking me to invent reasons for on campus sessions from March. This means me changing my timetable (and everything that goes with it) again. I asked 'why are we doing this'. I was told 'to give students a flavour of lab work'. I asked what of they can't come in due to having not returned to London? I was told 'they would not be disadvantaged if they can't do it'. I said if there is no disadvantage to not coming in, why come in. Silence.

This is 110% BULLSHIT and sweaty-handed panic. Students are stuck in flats or halls of residence, pointlessly spending money on rent, in many cases isolated, rarely if ever actually coming on to campus, and if so for bullshit made up exercises, just so we can say we did teach them normally (occasionally).

There is a lot of mental health issues. The completion rate for my first written exercise is at a record low. Students are even failing to submit mitigation requests (for extensions) and will lose marks as a consequence. I sit on the mitigation panel every Wednesday morning and we are inundated.

This is shithousery at its English finest. My 'leaders' are wandering around congratulating one another for their achievements. I have email folders awash with attachments outlining new procedures for this and new protocols for that. We have people in full time employment constantly rewriting rules for social distancing, how many students can be in a room of X proportions, updated on the latest advice from HMG, 'following the science'.

I suggested on NSC last Spring that if you had a kid at uni, the best plan is to defer till 2021-22 beceause there would be nothing of substance on Campus till January 2021 ('semester 2') at the earliest, and if Covid is a seasonal flu, nothing of substance for the entire academic year. Did anyone follow my advice? Hard to do so in the face of the warm wind of bullshit blowing in from HMG, perhaps.

And yet the majority of students are stoic and understanding. At least where I work. And in the sciences. It may be different in humanities at the university of the South Bank etc. Yes, good students, stoic, understanding that in May or June when most are vaccinated and summer is upon us all of this will be essentially over....the students get it, but academic 'leaders' and HMG don't. Who knew?

Sadly our 'government' has been like a teenager who has just discovered online gambling - constantly at it, hedging bets, changing the groundrules in a desperate attempt to achieve the impossible - keeping the spread of Covid down while keeping everything normal. A pefect storm of ****wittery. And where I work, aided and abetted, eagerly, by doe-eyed fools who couldn't strategise a shit let alone deal with the ramifications of Covid.

I'm very sorry for those of you with kids at uni. You have been lied to.

Someone said to me last Spring if we bin a year of uni there will be double the number of students next year, too many bums for the seats. Actually that was before we discovered Kaltura and narrated powerpoints. I expect we could easily mitigate against big classes for a year by doing more online. We already have all our lectures recorded now, with captions, all good quality stuff. In fact I suspect we have been forced, accidentally, into a game change....going to university (certainly for a year at a time) may soon become a thing of the past for many kids, with so much doable online......

For courses with practical work it is different. The medical students and dentists have all been on campus throughout. But even that regime could be edited so all the labwork occurs at once. Anyway, if there are sensible modifications that might be made we can rest assured they won't happen.

Incidentally, I don't know how the vaccination prioritisation is working across the UK, but at my uni anyone can rock up and get vaccinated. No prioritization, and very little ID checking. This isn't properly advertised and there is no guarantee you get a jab the same day you turn up (which is why I haven't gone up to London on the off chance). Students can be jabbed too. Not a lot of people seem to know this.

Best wishes to parents and students

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Hampster Gull said:

That’s the generic dilemma for the “inbetweener” years, the need for independence and the need for support

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

I suggested on NSC last Spring that if you had a kid at uni, the best plan is to defer till 2021-22 beceause there would be nothing of substance on Campus till January 2021 ('semester 2') at the earliest, and if Covid is a seasonal flu, nothing of substance for the entire academic year. Did anyone follow my advice? Hard to do so in the face of the warm wind of bullshit blowing in from HMG, perhaps.

And yet the majority of students are stoic and understanding. At least where I work. And in the sciences. It may be different in humanities at the university of the South Bank etc. Yes, good students, stoic, understanding that in May or June when most are vaccinated and summer is upon us all of this will be essentially over....the students get it, but academic 'leaders' and HMG don't. Who knew?

Sadly our 'government' has been like a teenager who has just discovered online gambling - constantly at it, hedging bets, changing the groundrules in a desperate attempt to achieve the impossible - keeping the spread of Covid down while keeping everything normal. A pefect storm of ****wittery. And where I work, aided and abetted, eagerly, by doe-eyed fools who couldn't strategise a shit let alone deal with the ramifications of Covid.

I'm very sorry for those of you with kids at uni. You have been lied to.

Someone said to me last Spring if we bin a year of uni there will be double the number of students next year, too many bums for the seats. Actually that was before we discovered Kaltura and narrated powerpoints. I expect we could easily mitigate against big classes for a year by doing more online. We already have all our lectures recorded now, with captions, all good quality stuff. In fact I suspect we have been forced, accidentally, into a game change....going to university (certainly for a year at a time) may soon become a thing of the past for many kids, with so much doable online......

For courses with practical work it is different. The medical students and dentists have all been on campus throughout. But even that regime could be edited so all the labwork occurs at once. Anyway, if there are sensible modifications that might be made we can rest assured they won't happen.

Incidentally, I don't know how the vaccination prioritisation is working across the UK, but at my uni anyone can rock up and get vaccinated. No prioritization, and very little ID checking. This isn't properly advertised and there is no guarantee you get a jab the same day you turn up (which is why I haven't gone up to London on the off chance). Students can be jabbed too. Not a lot of people seem to know this.

Best wishes to parents and students

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Hampster Gull said:

As ever great insight.

For me, I did talk to youngest about deferring a year but he was adamant and i was not strongly opinionated either way. Perhaps if I’d seen your spring posting I might have been, maybe maybe not. I have tried to help my kids be independent, to make their own informed calls.

There is also a powerful pull for the youth to be part of their own cohort, in this case the cohort going from a levels to uni, part of their people on the same journey. It would have required the govt to step in and have called it early for all, which this govt has not been able to do, bar some notable exceptions. Genuine q, has any govt stopped uni for a year? Without that there was a natural pull with peers to complete the next step on their life journey. And of course there are years 2 and 3, the same pull for those already at uni.

And what would they have done for a year in their bedroom at home. No job, no friends around. In our case, I strongly suspect my youngest would have struggled mentally far more in that situation.

Whilst the educational experience is poor it’s not valueless. Maybe. The social life for those physically attending campus or nearby is poor compared to what many have experienced, but it’s not nothing. It’s a mixed experience from what I am seeing. They know it’s all suboptimal but it’s part of their life experience, part of their cohorts life experience.

I worry more about what jobs are available to students as they leave. As a minor insight, we have pulled our grad scheme, which took on 150-200 a year.

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Green Cross Code Man said:

Any parents of students here who have returned to uni in the current lockdown?

One of my sons wants to return back to his uni, citing various friends who are back. I know arts and sciences are given dispensation to return to face to face teaching but it seems clear to me that other students are allowed back only in exceptional circumstances, ie. unsuitable learning environment or accommodation, or for reasons of health and safety. The govt repeats this criteria several places but rather unhelpfully, the Dean of his uni has been a bit more vague, mentioning well-being as well.
Now my view is that the instruction is clear to stay put, but he argues that he is suffering mentally and can't study as well here at home. I do agree with that but I don't consider his position as exceptional, merely one replicated by hundreds of thousands of others up and down the country.

I'd be interested in any views, be they from parents or students particularly if you have faced a similar decision.

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nordicgod said:

About 50,000 students got off the train at Falmer last evening after having a lovely day out on the beach at brighton

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macbeth said:

In that case I'd leave it up to him. If you're paying for something, you have the right to use it, in my opinion anyway. I'm not sure if it would even be illegal as surely it would count as essential travel, particularly if he has books/notes at his accommodation?

Especially since the risk of catching COVID has diminished significantly since term started in January, it may come down to more of a 'common sense' approach as opposed to going purely by the book, especially if he says he's suffering mentally. Hope you can find some sort of solution that works.

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