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March 28, 2024, 02:17:02 PM

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University Challenged

Started by Alberon, March 16, 2020, 10:17:12 PM

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Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on September 29, 2020, 11:11:52 AM
Can you not capture the first session, make it available (I think zoom can do this automatically and even caption it very badly in the process) then tell people who didn't watch it live they're welcome to contact you with further questions?

Tutorial so based on what questions the small cohort have on a series of worksheets - but, yeah, the powerpoint and recording will be available.

I think it will either move completely online or completely in person.

Quote from: Attila on September 28, 2020, 11:00:19 PM
Nah,  I'm glad it's going well for you, honestly! :)

It's the blended learning stuff that's doing my head in, and is exhausting to get everything prepped and done for the online portion, then spend ages commuting to teach for 45 minutes when so far Teams and/or media in the classroom has not worked.

Meanwhile, one of the people made redundant over the summer has left a huge gap in the curriculum -- and that person's modules are still on the books and filled with students. They're trying to hand it to someone in the dept who doesn't have any experience in the area of study under consideration (and it's a final year, not an intro, module). That person is stressing out at having to teach it, so now they're looking at me to do it. It's complementary to what I teach, but a completely different emphasis and not my area of expertise at all. I could muddle through if I have the person's lecture notes and PPTs, but it would mean I'm teaching on 7 modules next spring instead of just six.

Fuck knows.

This seems increasingly common doesn't it. I was asked to write a module for one of these privatised international study centres that they have. I could have easily done the management module and about 40% of an international business module (both a bit outside my expertise, but it's first year and I've taught both before anyway). Instead they wanted me to write a quant methods module or the full international business one, rather than the one that most closely aligns with my expertise.

Meanwhile, I've just got off the phone with a mate who came to academia via a distance learning diploma and MA having served as a union rep for 25 years. He's now teaching HRM on a hastily assembled MBA. He said there were a fair few car crash moments with them asking him questions he simply doesn't know the answers to. I have another mate in a similar position elsewhere who was having to learn psychology in the morning in order to teach it in the afternoon.

Trapped in your flat (an easy mistake for the council to make but the grills on the window are an eyesore), paying fees and rent out of your arse, and being taught by people who aren't experts in whatever topic they're teaching - but at least they're paid fuck all. Absolutely run into the ground.

Blue Jam

Just made another complaint about another health and safety person abusing the Covid rules to lord it over everyone else in the building.

AWWWW NAW AM NO A GRASS

poo

1st F2F done. Really enjoyed being back in the lab teaching again. Downside is I'll be dead within a fortnight.

Attila

Quote from: greencalx on September 29, 2020, 10:46:22 AM
By "blended" do you mean trying to teach in-person and online at the same time. That's not blended, that's madness. We're not doing that (Director of Teaching decision).

Yep -- All of my 'face to face' teaching involves people both in the room, and dialling in. The uni here calls this 'blended learning.'

So, for example, I have a year 3 module of about 8 students, so every week, 9  of them are to attend and 9 are to dial in -- and they alternate weeks who attends and who doesn't.

I have a year 2 module with 25 students on it, and that's considered too large to d that rota, so there are two back to back seminars where half the class is in one, half in the other. They come every week, but I still have to have a Teams session at the same time for those who are isolating.

I have two other modules where everyone is supposed to come every week BUT I have to run a teams session at the same time for those who dial in.

So I'm monitoring a group in the room, on Teams, plus the chatroom (since the ones on teams often don't want to speak), and the raise hands function -- I can't see the chat or raise hands when I share my screen, so in each classroom, I have a laptop and the desktop going at the same time, so that I can monitor myself along with the students in the room, and the students diallling in.

Four sessions of this on Monday, two on Thursday, and then another four on Fridays.

Everything is recorded, and then has to be loaded onto their weekly module webpages -- even when all of the students are actually in attendence.

Half the time the connectivity in the classrooms is poor, Teams lags or sticks, or there's some other tech issue. By the time I got back to the house Friday I had a banger of a headache that I couldn't throw off til late Saturday, and then all day Sunday was putting together the online interactive stuff (discussion groups, seminar activities, padlet-type stuff) for this week.

Tues-Wed are Teams meetings, synchronous big seminars (on the stuff that I team teach), Teams tutorials, training workshops (because we are still being introduced to new initiatives as the senior management wunderkind comes up with new shit for us to do) and meetings. At the moment, I've got a rare hour today that I'm not in a live seminar or tedious training workshop (this one coming up is a two hour training session on how I'm personally responsible for rentention of students on my programme, and how I'm meant to do this, and how I'll be monitored for my success failure when it comes to next year's redundancies.

Whee.

They're also the days where I monitor all of the activities that are running for the modules for the week -- no point in setting them tasks on a discussion page if I don't read it, make comments on it, ask further questions -- otherwise, I can see them thinking, What's the point,she's not looking at it.

I have six modules this semester, so that's a heck of a lot of activities, chats, discussions, etc. It really demonstrates how much is actually accomplished in a two hour face to face session in the olde worlde.

I'm trying to be fairly structured with the freshmen, too, since they're coming off a summer with no direction and a lot of uncertainty on top of the usual freshment shellshock when it comes to university classes.

On the bright side, the students on my modules anyway really do engage, so the time put into the activities and stuff so far is paying off. The seminar today was wrangling about 80 students online through discussion and a rapidly moving chatroom -- it's exhausting, but it was good to see that they were into it, and prepared (more or less) for the discussion thanks to the activities leading up to it.

Students have also sent really supportive emails to me and a couple of colleagues, asking how we are, since the university seems to be 100% focused on their well-being, and fuck the staff. It's been much appreciated.

Dog Botherer

how do i convince my sister, currently safely in my parents house in ireland, not to go back to her english plague hive?

her and my parents have been very sensible with the Covid so far but i'm detecting a hint of the "ah sure it'll be grand" creeping in.

Attila

She could come to my uni , which has just sent around again a notice that there is NO covid on campus and NO covid in the city/surrounding area.

Meanwhile, we have students and now staff having to isolate due to exposure to family/friends/whatever who have tested positive.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Attila on September 29, 2020, 02:54:45 PM
She could come to my uni , which has just sent around again a notice that there is NO covid on campus and NO covid in the city/surrounding area.

Meanwhile, we have students and now staff having to isolate due to exposure to family/friends/whatever who have tested positive.

This is proper "there is no HIV positive GDR blood because there are no drug users or homosexuals in the GDR" type bullshit.

Attila

I was thinking more 'There is no cannibalism in the British Navy, and when I say none, I mean some'

greencalx

Quote from: Attila on September 29, 2020, 01:46:17 PM
Yep -- All of my 'face to face' teaching involves people both in the room, and dialling in. The uni here calls this 'blended learning.'

Educational jargon is really annoying; worse when it gets co-opted as a marketing term. (The Scottish Govt used 'blended learning' to mean that 'parents doing the teaching'). My understanding is that it is supposed to mean a mixture of online and tutored stuff. If your online offering is textbook, then it's what we used to call 'learning'.

Here we concluded fairly early on that simultaneous in-person and online is a sofa-bed of a classroom: crap sofa, crap bed. So at least we got that out of the way. Our model is to offer the maximum amount of in-person that can be accommodated with 2m distancing, which for us turns out to be an hour a week per course. The rest is fully online. This has avoided going late into the evening or the weekend, as was mooted at one point - my latest class finishes at 6pm (and we used to have such classes before Covid; not that I was happy about that, but the schedule is halfway reasonable). We've ended up with about the same amount of interaction with the students that we previously had; and with the lectures being more like a tutorial with 200 students due to the way the live chat works, it's arguably more.

Having so much stuff flying around while you are teaching does give a bit of an adrenaline rush, and I am getting a kick out of that. Also the students seem to be enjoying it. They even claim to like the stuff I prerecorded over the summer, which I'm quite pleased about because that was all pretty much done in one take with minimal editing.

Quote
Students have also sent really supportive emails to me and a couple of colleagues, asking how we are, since the university seems to be 100% focused on their well-being, and fuck the staff. It's been much appreciated.

The students generally have been great, I must say.

greencalx

(It's not all roses; some aspects of the preparation have been a royal PITA. Captioning in particular. But those rants have been saved for my weekly meetings with the boss...)

Puce Moment

Loving not leaving the house to do my job.

Tech side is iffy, but not insurmountable. I might start liking my job at this rate, especially if the new normal is teaching in my PJs.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: greencalx on September 29, 2020, 06:21:57 PM
(It's not all roses; some aspects of the preparation have been a royal PITA. Captioning in particular. But those rants have been saved for my weekly meetings with the boss...)

do you have to type the captions yourself?

greencalx

Quote from: BlodwynPig on September 29, 2020, 06:26:25 PM
do you have to type the captions yourself?

In principle no. But if the ML algorithms have never encountered speech patterns like yours before, yes. The irony is that in most of my teaching I am saying what I am writing down at the time.

I made some noises on the EDI impacts on staff with non-standard accents, and things have gone a bit quieter since then.

Quote from: Attila on September 29, 2020, 03:35:16 PM
I was thinking more 'There is no cannibalism in the British Navy, and when I say none, I mean some'

now pass me that leg.

Zetetic

#555
The horrible fact lurking grotesquely in the background of this enormous amount of seriously-undertaken extra work is that 99% of lectures would be best delivered in text and diagrams amounting to about four sides of A4.

Edit: Which probably comes across as meaner than I meant it. I think it's a shame that it's a distraction from much more valuable things like making tutorials work properly.

Blue Jam

Quote from: greencalx on September 29, 2020, 08:20:37 PM
In principle no. But if the ML algorithms have never encountered speech patterns like yours before, yes.

Obligatory link:

https://youtu.be/J3lYLphzAnw

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: greencalx on September 29, 2020, 08:20:37 PM
In principle no. But if the ML algorithms have never encountered speech patterns like yours before, yes. The irony is that in most of my teaching I am saying what I am writing down at the time.

I made some noises on the EDI impacts on staff with non-standard accents, and things have gone a bit quieter since then.

A guy at work with a bit of a Westcountry accent did a presentation about setting up purchases within work here. Lots of abbreviations and it didn't take long for the captions to make fuck all sense.

Incidentally I'd have thought a lot of academic subjects would have their own terminology that whilst common within the subject use words that are very unlikely to crop up in speech elsewhere. The way subtitlers in television handle this (subtitling often utilises speech recognition, but relies on subtitlers who've had the system trained to their voices "re-speaking" what's being said on tv) using special corpus's with different waitings. I.E. they'll use a different specialist corpus with different weightings for a Weather bulletin.

Captain Z

Quote from: greencalx on September 29, 2020, 10:46:22 AM
By "blended" do you mean trying to teach in-person and online at the same time. That's not blended, that's madness.


greencalx

Quote from: Zetetic on September 29, 2020, 08:45:45 PM
The horrible fact lurking grotesquely in the background of this enormous amount of seriously-undertaken extra work is that 99% of lectures would be best delivered in text and diagrams amounting to about four sides of A4.

No.

Blue Jam

Ewing Hall at Bollock Halls now under LOCKDOWN

greencalx

That was yesterday! Do keep up.

At the rate things are going I think all my first year tutorials will be online by the end of next week.

BlodwynPig

A lot of prevaricating. A virus' dream.

BlodwynPig

Looks like Newcastle students are cutting out the middle virus and going straight to murder. Fucking hell.

The university really in meltdown.

Dex Sawash




QuoteDuke University's comprehensive COVID-19 testing program received results from 14,554 tests administered to students, faculty and staff from September 26 – October 2, 2020. In total, there were 20 positive results – ten undergraduate students, five graduate/professional students and five faculty/staff. The positivity rate for this period was 0.137%.   

https://today.duke.edu/2020/10/covid-19-test-update-sept-26-oct-2?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Testing%20update&utm_campaign=dukedailyOct5_20

Attila

Several confirmed, unrelated cases of covid on campus now. Management just sent around an email saying that they're working closely with these people to sort out any track and trace but in the meantime, everyone is to continue as normal, and to keep teaching on campus, &c.

Most of the email is, in fact, emphasising over and over again that campus will continue to operate as it has been, and no one is to shift to online teaching unless we're contacted as being someone who's come into contact with one of these confirmed cases.


Alberon

Our uni has a webpage updating with the number of confirmed cases that week. We're only at Tuesday and it's in double figures, but still, we're a lot better than most.

The VC in a staff email has given one of the reasons for staying open for F2F teaching as financial meltdown (my words not his) if we need to start refunding, which is honest but a little dispiriting.

Attila

If my university has to start refunding housing fees, we're finished. They've borrowed way too much against future student fees to survive.

I'm working like mad to get all of my lessons for each week sorted, engaging, all that jazz, while always in the back of my head is the fear of copping a dose of covid, on the one hand, and all of this being for nought on the other if I get sacked anyway.

Sigh.

BlodwynPig

The beige prevails. Can't see any Uni going under right now. But by fuck have there been some plagues recently.

Camp Tramp

Just had my first 3 lectures these last two days.

There has been some technical difficulties with both Panopto and Teams. I keep seeing notifications that Panopto isn't working at all. Also the lecturer I had yesterday informed us that he wasn't recording the lecture and that the UCU has locked horns with the administration because they are insisting that all sessions be recorded.

I thought the lectures went fine though, the most irritating thing were the other students who kept talking shit in the text channel on Teams. In the end it outweighed the useful info being shared so I minimised it.

All of the lecturers have also said that they prefer webcam feeds from the students rather than avatars.