One of the more unnerving aspects of All This – professionally speaking – is the coupling of highly localised concerns – how will I teach my class? – with very general ones – will the HE sector survive?
Much as we grumble about the former, and spend hours in webinars and talking with colleagues about tips and options, the latter tends to get less attention. Mainly because it raises all kinds of unpleasant visions and because it’s beyond our control.
However, it’s still useful to reflect a bit on how the big stuff might trickle down to our pedagogic practice.
The main part of this is the impact on student numbers.
As a working assumption, there’s going to be a contraction of numbers next academic year: international students might not be allowed to travel, especially to countries with high Covid-19 infection rates; and students from all locations might decide that going to a place with lots of sweaty teenagers isn’t the best look for staying well. And that’s going to include returning students as well as new ones.
Which is all a bit of a kick in the teeth to any university (or country) that charged down the internationalisation path over the past decade or two.
With international students typically paying higher fees, and all student income subsidising the other stuff that universities do (um, research), not least because students pay lots of money beyond fees (accommodation, food, drink, ents, etc), the question becomes one of how big the budget gap is going to be.
(There’s a very good piece on Tortoise about this in the UK BTW. Recent data from the British Council suggest we still have a lot of uncertain overseas students).
Of course, that funding shortfall also means the sound of belts being tightened.
I’ll assume your institution has reviewed whether provision can be trimmed to keep costs down – not recruiting for smaller programmes, getting rid of the unpopular modules/courses – and maybe it’s also started acting on staff costs – recruitment freezes, non-renewals of short-term contracts, redundancies.
That increased precarity obviously does not help in the effort to concentrate on developing good pedagogic practice for a distanced classroom.
But uncertainty over student numbers is also an issue more directly, in planning what one might do with one’s classes at all.
Usually at this stage in the year, I’d have a good sense of how many people I’d be teaching in the autumn semester and I’d be planning accordingly. This year? Less so. And that’s for programmes that haven’t got that many non-domestic students on them, so our variability is probably less than for others.
And this is even before we consider whether a more local student body means we’ll be losing some of the diversity of experiences and insights that so often generates valuable debate in the class.
Or whether those students that do attend end up being even more likely to have to work to support themselves through university because their families haven’t got the means they once did, in turn reducing students’ study time and focus.
Or whether the increased use of online teaching elements reinforces differences of learning opportunities for those less able to afford suitable equipment or internet connections.
As ever, I haven’t got the answers to these things, but I can suggest that we do need to think about the knock-on effects on our teaching and learning practice.
Good luck, as they say, with that.