Noah Eastwood on the pain of universities choosing to not return to full in person teaching.
Universities are making few promises. In line with the general attitude towards reopening adopted by higher education, administrators at King’s are taking incredibly conservative steps to return to normal. As term restarts this September, ‘blended’ learning, where courses are delivered both online and in-person, remains the College’s official approach to the year ahead despite restrictions long since having lifted.
Many of us will be finishing up a summer of festival-going and travelling, having at last enjoyed the kind of social freedom forbad for the past nineteen-or-so months. While much of the country has eagerly moved on from Covid compromises, universities are stuck in the past. Online learning was meant to be a temporary measure but now it has become a permanent feature of going to university. Higher education is no different to any other sector effected by the pandemic, yet university leaders continue to act as thoughthey have a right to an excess of caution.
The reluctance to dump online learning will be acutely felt by students as they are given their timetables for the forthcoming semester. Many will see lectures replaced with pre-recorded presentations and notice how some seminars are still being held online. Ask your peers how their schedules are looking and don’t be surprised some have bagged an extra hour or two of in-person teaching. Afterall, it’s pot-luck. Delivery methods vary between faculty, department, and even by module. The fact is that the College has no bottom line on this other than insisting ‘campus is open’. Students deserve a fair and equal distribution of traditional teaching. Without any good reason to use university facilities then they are basically useless and accommodation in London is a pointless expense.
Clear and consistent standards on how education is to bedelivered are needed urgently. Without these, students will not be getting value for money. Home fees remain £9,250 a year and international fees can be far higher. In recent correspondence with Vice Principal and Interim Vice-President (Education) Adam Fagan, I put to him the fact that a bachelor’s degree from the Open University, where courses are taught fully online, costs just £6,336 a year. How can any university, I asked, justify charging more for what is effectively the same service? He failed to address this in his response. Selective silence here says a lot.
While universities labour the point about keeping everyone safe, there are almost certainly other factors at play. For King’s, on-site capacity has always been an issue as a central London campus where real estate prices are some of the highest in the world. Many students will remember feelingclaustrophobic in S-1, 2, & 3 before Covid. With the purchase of Bush House in 2015 and planned leases for the rest of the Aldwych Quarter by 2025, King’s has spent millions on expanding its footprint. The normalisation of online learning presents a unique financial opportunity. Universities do nothave to worry about capacity when they can have infinite fee-paying students all attending class virtually.
It should not surprise anyone that many universities are planning to massively expand their online programmes in the coming years. The work from home revolution caused by repeated lockdowns has given people greater freedom which they are reluctant to relinquish. Offices are not returning to normal as workers find they have more time on their hands and a wider choice of places to live without the commute. Some firms are embracing the change and saving costs by scrapping expensive office space. A similar, more one-sided,phenomenon is occurring in higher education. Universities too are realising that there is a whole world of new opportunities and trends to exploit post-Covid. In an effort to keep the more expedient aspects of online leaning going indefinitely,university leaders are quietly replacing traditional modes of education with blended learning without properly consulting students.
In a statement from The Russel Group published in August, blended learning is heralded as the ‘future’ and digital modes of delivery are promised to ‘enhance’ university education. They have even gone as far as to reject the concept of lectures completely, promoting online interactive sessions instead. The way many top universities are now talking about online learning seems to have little to do with public health anymore.being influenced by public health concerns anymore. Perhaps higher education institutions are really just succumbing to post-pandemic opportunism, squeezing teaching a little harder and trying to get away with doing less for the same price.
It is regrettably the case nowerdays that in higher education money talks and learning quality slides. Recently, leading universities were revealed to be charting flights for studentsfrom China to the UK in an effort to win back some £1.3 billion in at-risk fee payments. Moreover, after an unprecedented number of students won places at their first choice of university and enrolment was too high, medical students at Leeds and Manchester were offered £10,000 to defer their place. Clearly, institutions are willing to move mountains to get what they want. For students however, horizons have changed little since March 2020.
There are a few things that the government and Office for Students need to make clear to senior academics going forward. Online learning is not the same as in-person tuition, where students spend their week on campus physically within a learning environment. If places of higher education can provide this to students under the current national restrictions then they should do so. Forcing students to study remotely when there is no need and charging the full fee is clearly unreasonable, a point made by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson recently. More honesty is needed from universities so students know exactly what they are signing up for.
Our education is under attack. Even before the pandemic, students faced declining contact hours and abandonment from professors in favour of ‘group discussion’ led by underpaid graduate teaching staff. Now the arm’s length is extending and universities are repackaging online learning, which will only keep students at a distance. All this is set against a rising cost of living, debt and a grotesquely competitive jobs market. Do not be fooled; blended learning is university-lite. Plans for higher education post-Covid seem to be more radical than anyone is realising. Everyone needs to be included in the conversation about the future of university education and students, especially those who began degrees before the pandemic, need to have the final say on major changes to their modes of study.
