[Academic] Fwd: Face to face

[physics-director-teaching]

Dear All,

After contacts from some of you on this issue, the following is to let you know the situation that the Department is in with regard to the requirements for face to face teaching as we enter week 2. I urge you not to read anything more into it than that. There is no judgement on my part intended. It also suggests some courses of action. Suggestions not rules. Don’t shoot the messenger.

There is an expectation from the Faculty and the student body that we provide face to face tutorials. This does not have to be all of our tutorials, but it does have to be a significant fraction of them. The Faculty are checking regularly how much f2f we are delivering as they have to provide a return to the Scottish Government via the University Centre (their first check was before the teaching had begun).

Some of you will have difficulty with delivering f2f, either for personal health reasons, or because you are caring for someone in a high risk covid group and this is understandable. There are a few cases (not in Physics to my knowledge) of people who are prepared to come on campus for research, perhaps to supervise their postdocs and PhD students, but not to teach UGs. I can see a justification in terms of numbers of, and closeness of, contacts, but such a situation clearly doesn’t look good externally. There have also been, in more than one Department in the Faculty, complaints from the student body about the fraction of f2f teaching that they are due to receive.  So if you are considering moving your tutorials online for whatever reason I ask you to take account of the following before doing so

(1) if you can make a case that you should not teach f2f for one of the health related reasons above, try to propose a solution yourself (i.e. use your postdoc to deliver the class if you have one, or otherwise try to arrange an appropriate substitute - let us know), or
(2) you should make a case that your particular class is educationally better delivered online and that delivering it online does not affect significantly any f2f classes delivered immediately before or afterwards.
(3) Be able to justify your decision and log and try to deal with any complaints or issues that it raises, issues in conjunction with your Year Coordinator in the first instance, complaints must be logged and transmitted to Gabrielle.

The University and the Faculty have made it clear that there is an expectation that students attend f2f classes on campus unless they have obtained permission from the VDA and logged personal circumstances detailing the reasons. Even if they are temporarily ill they should log personal circumstances before attending online classes until they recover. Therefore canvassing the students’ opinion on whether they want f2f or online will probably not be seen as good enough reason for switching a class tutorial to online only.

Best
John
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Professor John Jeffers
Director of Teaching
Department of Physics
University of Strathclyde
john.jeffers at strath.ac.uk<mailto:john.jeffers at strath.ac.uk>
0141 552 3457

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