Another day of juggling everythings to enable the university to move online. It’s like playing football on a bouncy castle while the goalposts are moved every 5 minutes. This isn’t a criticism of my institution at all — everyone is doing their best — it’s just the situation.

Higher Ed institutions are often massive, unwieldy beasts with layers of (mostly necessary) organisation and (sometimes unnecessary) lengthy processes. For us to be reactive to a changing situation like a pandemic is like trying to handbrake turn an oil tanker.

The theory is simple: record lectures; put them online; hold face-to-face seminars in socially-distances small groups. Easy, right? Nope.

Record lectures: with what equipment? What standards? What format? And that’s ten hours of lectures per module (I teach 3 or 4 modules a year) and, no shit, it takes half a day to record one lecture *after* you’ve done the slides. And not all staff know how to record lectures.

Put stuff online: not just a simple task of uploading to the VLE. It requires bandwidth considerations (for staff and for the students who will watch them), accessibility, templates, structuring of module pages, etc.

Hold face to face socially-distances seminars: this is the golden goal but it’s a timetabling nightmare as we obviously can’t use normal seminar-sized rooms. And what happens if someone in that seminar group gets ill? And we all have to self-isolate? Or a staff member is ill?

How do we make sure that new and returning students can be part of this community that we work so hard to build? Students are the essence of the university. We want them to talk and to form friendships and to share and to enjoy the experience.

How do we make sure that staff can cope? My university has clearly stated that childcare/caring roles are vital and that we should do what we can around those. Aside from the joys of homeschooling there are other factors, e.g. we’re currently up against deadlines for exam boards.

Not everyone has a space at home to work. I have a corner of the bedroom. I bought myself a monitor. Then my laptop broke. Now I’m working off a borrowed old laptop and iPad while awaiting a new work laptop. I’ll record on my phone. I need a lapel mic and a tripod.

I’ll need to sit down and re-plan my modules. I’ll need to re-do my slides. I’ll need to segment things into manageable chunks. I’ll need to plan seminars where people sit apart (or online). And then I’ll need to record, edit and upload those.

I can’t start that yet, though, as a) too busy with exam boards/admin/planning/homeschooling; b) we need to be relatively certain the goalposts are going to stay in one place for a while; c) we need the processes to be in place.

Don’t talk to me about research. There’s no chance of me doing any this summer. I have a heavy admin role and a lot of teaching to prepare. I’m taking a week off in August and I’m resisting spending the time doing research. This will be a shit year on my CV.

In conclusion: we are not quite headless chickens, we’re just trying to get a university of 32,000 students and 8,500 staff up and running in a global pandemic (while homeschooling). Send wine.