Sphinx

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time over the last week or so in conversations with colleagues about how we’re going to manage teaching next year. One takeaway from this is a reminder of how dedicated, imaginative and insightful the aforementioned colleagues are. It’s fair to say that we’ve got a spectrum from those who see this as an exciting opportunity to try out new approaches and radically change some of our traditional teaching styles, and those who are focused on ways to maintain more conventional teaching approaches in dramatically new and uncertain circumstances. But there’s nobody who is insisting on privileging their convenience over flexibility, or unwilling to countenance radical change if that’s what best suits student needs.

A second takeaway is how difficult this actually is. Perhaps it’s because even the revolutionaries among us are more used to incremental change; we assume a basic model of teaching and then think about how to accommodate particular student needs (rather than assuming that students will accommodate themselves to the system), we modify content while maintaining structure, or modify assessment methods while keeping the core content – we don’t normally go back to the drawing board to this extent, and maybe it’s too open-ended to make decisions easily in the time available.

But there are at least two reasons why this isn’t just academics being academical and unworldly, exploring every nuance and hypothetical problem rather than just getting on with things. One is the uncertainty about the behaviour of the virus and hence the appropriate countermeasures; intuitively, it makes sense that big lectures will be much riskier than small socially-distanced tutorial or seminars (hence announcements from Cambridge and Bristol that they’re cancelling physical lectures next year), but actually there are indications that this may not be the case, which then makes it harder to decide on even the most basic questions of what teaching should look like next year.

The second issue is that many of the issues we’re trying to tackle either are, or come close to being, wicked problems: not just that there is no perfect solution but only an uncomfortable choice between sub-optimal alternatives driven by contradictory imperatives, but the success of a chosen policy is dependent on factors that cannot be predicted, and yet we will be blamed for the outcome regardless. And all this is taking place in the familiar context of quietly vicious inter-university competition, with institutions carefully watching what their rivals are doing, weighing up whether to make bold announcements now about next year (risky) or delay as long as possible (risky), knowing that what happens now will affect student choices and hence finances, but not knowing how it will affect them.

As the Government guidance on reopening universities, published yesterday, makes clear, universities are expected to ensure the quality of the education and to ensure student and staff safety. Ensuring student and staff safety means we can’t just do what we normally do. Quality education is defined, more or less, in the eyes of students and external observers, by us doing what we normally do – note that various voices in the media have already denounced any shift online, the only sensible means we have for ensuring safety, as by definition a reduction in quality. And “quality” is as ever an utterly meaningless and unhelpful term with no fixed standard or means of measurement; actually we will be judged by student satisfaction, which may have no particular connection to the learning provision itself but be all about the university experience, or lack thereof. How far is it the responsibility of universities to replicate the experience of going to pubs or clubs with lots of other young people? Not much – except that it could make an enormous difference to the success of our plans for teaching. I need to post this on the departmental discussion board…

And this problem goes all the way down. Suppose we (I’ll come back to the identity of ‘we’ in a moment) take the line that safety requires the abandonment of all face-to-face teaching, so we focus our energies for next year on ensuring the quality of online provision. This brings us to the sorts of issues we’ve been discussing. We know that not all students have great broadband or equipment, or the privacy or opportunity to take part in online Teams or Zoom seminars at a specific time, or may be in different time zones. Do we respond to this by making everything asynchronous as far as possible, at the risk of general student discontent (since one imagines that they will be expecting at least online face-to-face interaction as a bare minimum), or do we set up a minimum level of synchronous activity for all courses despite knowing this might disadvantage some students in some groups? Having the former as a possibility in the event that a given group contains a student who needs such alternative provision doesn’t work, as we’ll need to do the preparation in advance for one mode of delivery rather than another – besides the risk of marking out a ‘target’ if other students then feel unhappy that they’re getting an inferior experience to other courses because of one person’s needs. Again, there’s no good answer to this one; we’re just searching for the least bad option.

Which brings me back to the question of ‘we’: who takes responsibility? Certainly not the individual academic; we clearly need departmental solidarity on this. The department? Deeply problematic in a place like Exeter where so many of our students do joint or combined degrees, and can easily compare what different departments are doing. I think we could make either system work not too badly, especially if – bluntly – we can present it as the decision of faculty- or university-level authority which we are required to implement; some students might not be happy, but I would guess that they would be less unhappy than if they knew we as a department had a choice and chose the approach that directly affects them.

Does the new government document offer any helpful guidance on this? I think you all know the answer to that, but it is still remarkable how vacuous it is; the twin imperatives of quality and safety are repeated incessantly – there’s clearly a minimum word count for this sort of briefing paper, that had to be met somehow – but it’s all left down to universities, on existing budgets, to decide what to do and then carry the can if something goes wrong. The government has made it clear that safety should be a priority; if there’s an upsurge in infection because of face-to-face teaching of some sort, that is universities showing reckless disregard for safety. The government has made it clear that quality should be a priority; if there’s widespread dissatisfaction because teaching is all online, that is universities ignoring student needs despite charging them enormous fees.

It’s entirely of a piece with all the other coronavirus guidance they’ve produced since the shift from ‘Stay At Home’ – a policy introduced with palpable reluctance – to the meaningless ‘Stay Alert’, and the push to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible while making any resurgence in infection rates the responsibility of individuals for failing to stay alert. Yes, they too face a wicked problem – but apparently it’s one where they can get away without actually taking direct responsibility for a decision or its consequences.

Perhaps this is what we need for the next academic year, a set of meaningless slogans directed at students that demonstrate we’re taking everything seriously without actually doing anything. ‘Work Hard! Have Fun! Don’t Get Infected!’ Other suggestions welcomed in the comments…