Sphinx

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently preparing next term’s teaching – it’s been one of those weeks when the lingering effects of the plague make me incapable of stringing coherent thoughts together for more than five minutes at a time, and the better prepared I am for the new academic year then the bigger the chance I may be able to get writing done then, if the brain finds its way out of the doldrums. Bibliographies, guidance on assessment tasks, seminar texts, thumbnail pictures for the VLE. And then we come to the description of teaching and learning methods, and summary of how students will be expected to engage with the modules… Hmm. Can I get back to you on that?

Well, I have a draft timetable that puts me, and by implication the students, into specified physical spaces at specified times in the week; and, unlike at a number of other universities, we haven’t had any pronouncements to the effect that the traditional in-person lecture is dead and everything will now be at least semi-virtual. On the other hand, as has been observed on the Twitter, the government’s predictable failure to make any sort of decision about compulsory vaccination to attend university means that it will now be too late to introduce any such rule without massive disruption – and a student body with lots of unvaccinated people surely implies regular plague outbreaks in the autumn, class numbers reduced by students self-isolating and the rest of it.

It’s obvious that, as last year, we’re going to need contingency plans; the problem is that I’m not sure how many. It’s no problem for the small final-year modules that I taught last year; it’s a relatively small amount of work to switch from in-person to online discussion (yes, the latter is more stressful and headache-inducing, but we should all now be better at it, and certainly it doesn’t involve more preparatory work now), and since I already have a load of material recorded I can plan for a ‘flipped classroom’ thing from the start. Planning for an MA module that I didn’t teach last year can follow similar lines – albeit in the knowledge that I may have to make time for a load of recording at some point, rather than leaving everything to open discussion.

The real problem is the big Greek History survey course: precisely the sort of numbers (150+) that can’t fit into even the biggest lecture theatre with social distancing – and the room we’ve been allocated has, iirc, no windows at all, so ventilation may be a bit of an issue. Now, this may look like the sort of thing that, in the eyes of university senior management who haven’t actually taught for years (e.g, comments from the Leeds VC), can be done more efficiently online: just record the lecture material and stick with the small seminar groups. But I have never taught this as simple ‘content delivery’; that is one element, but it sits alongside lots of small-group discussion, individual and group activities, games, role-playing exercise and the like, which will at best be tricky and time-consuming to switch online even given a completely free hand – which I almost certainly won’t get, as (understandably) any eventual university decision to mandate changes in delivery will come with a load of rules intended to maintain quality and mollify student unrest.

How to plan, in the face of so many unknowns? Cross fingers and hope that plague outbreaks will be relatively small-scale, so default will be to soldier on with ‘normal’ teaching and leave the isolators to make do with lecture recordings? Assume worst-case scenario A that everything will have to be radically overhauled by the end of October – in which case, plan for how I would want to teach, or for how I guess university will probably insist that I teach? Assume worst-case scenario B, that actually everything will need to be radically overhauled by the start of term, in which case there’s not a lot of point in doing too much work now..?