It's at times like this that I'm glad I live in an unfashionable part of town.
Freshers' week starts tomorrow. I have most of my ducks in a row, but am still waiting for some people to do their bits so I can finish everything off. I think we will more or less know what we are doing by the time the first lecture goes out.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when the usual Freshers' cough starts. Technically speaking, they will have to isolate and get a test (in the same way that we've all had to as our kids have come home from school with the cold that's doing the rounds at the moment, and happens also to be accompanied by a cough). I have a feeling that this alone will end in-person teaching from around week 2. Might not be a bad thing, all things considered.
[EDIT: bad choice of language]
My wager has been on getting through to the end of Week 3, and then moving completely online.
My university has stated, however, that unless the government says we have to go online, we will continue face to face teaching no matter how many cases are confirmed amongst students and staff.
Absolutely no idea how our version of blended learning is going to go (and I have classes on Monday of week 1 next week). I have literally 100s of pages of instructions, templates, initiatives, statements, plans, guidelines that I'm supposed to adhere to. Several times a week I get new ones that supercede the old to the point where I have no idea which is the current one. There is an 18 hours' worth of 'training' online I'm supposed to have sat through -- with much of that material now obsolete.
We've been told that every and anything we've been planning so far may all be for nothing once the 'rule of six' comes into play -- in which case, it's possible that we are reduced to only 5 students in a classroom at a time. This would leave me with roughly 16 seminars to teach every week (were this a normal semester, I would have 3 or 4 on top of lectures). However, we are being paid as if we're teaching the normal workload, because all of these extra seminars are just duplicates of one original, so it's not any additional work.
I wonder if senior management would see it that way: give the same rotten town hall talk 4 times a week, but only get speaker's fee for one because, after all, the other three would just be the same speech three more times and it's not more work, is it.
My laptop will last only an hour or so running Teams off its battery, as Teams eats energy. Two days a week at present, I have five one-hour seminars in a row, and no time to recharge in between (let alone eat, go for a wee, or, in one case, get from one side of campus to the other in the time allotted).
Oh, and it's been noted already that roughly 1/2 of the teaching rooms on campus do not have an HDMI cable which means that lecturers can't plug in laptops to run Teams/record/all the other stuff that they want us to do. (Why they didn't spring for webcams w/mikes for the big, robust desktop PCs in each of the classrooms absolutely baffles me. Instead they bought a bunch of laptops that are apparently problematic -- already -- and in short supply).