Just to follow on from my earlier posts about the proposal to move to online teaching. I live in the centre of Durham and I have a decent set up at home and yet today my WiFi cut in and out for hours. It's still dreadful now. Emails wouldn't send. Connections were lost.

If I'd been lecturing today, I'd have been in a total mess. I've no idea why the WiFi was so bad but it was and there was nothing I could do about it. You might think that perhaps it would be better in my office in the department
And yet...

When I'm on campus in my office, the WiFi is also patchy and sometimes I can't connect at all to DUWireless or Eduroam and have to use The Cloud. Yes. Seriously. It's a pain but one manages.

And if things go wrong or the system doesn't work, I'm experienced enough now to figure something out, to have a contingency plan, to stay calm, but I've been teaching a long time.

I wasn't always so confident or so equipped to deflect the anxiety and stress that comes from working with equipment or systems that are unreliable. Once it would have terrified me and played havoc with my anxiety. A constant thrum of what ifs, oh noes, and please not nows.

And I think about new staff, junior staff, adjunct staff, staff who live remotely, staff who lack resources, staff who aren't 'agile' but who panic if they can't manage their environment, and I think how vulnerable this proposed new system would make them.

I think of colleagues and students trying to run tech or do research remotely and the worry and panic that it might all disappear. I think about how they'll cope trying to stay calm alone without colleagues or college or peer support to hand to check in with and hear it's ok.

And I worry a lot about the mental health of those students studying remotely. How do we ensure that they receive the same attention, appropriate reasonable adjustments if required, the same pastoral support as the students in residence?

We don't have the resources to ensure that every student who wants counselling can get it in a timely fashion, and in a way that actually addresses the issues arising rather than simply patching up the student before passing them on. How will we cope if we expand further?

These are not negligible things. This proposal presupposes that everyone involved will have access to reliable technology. If the current staff don't even have that right now, how can they assume the whole university can switch to working this way by summer?

The proposal elides the risks associated with the wholesale recruitment of students whose working environments could be variable and potentially unsuitable. How can we guarantee those students won't be disadvantaged? Whose responsibility will it be to address issues that arise?

If I know nothing else, I know that whoever will be expected to address those issues will definitely not be anyone who came up with this proposal in the first place.