‘Covid has been a big catalyst’: universities plan for post-pandemic life

Manchester University this week became the first institution to confirm that lectures will remain permanently online, and responses to enquiries by the Guardian suggest it is unlikely to be the last, with many vice-chancellors keen to retain and build on changes wrought by the pandemic.

The lifting of Covid restrictions on 19 July, announced by the government this week, will allow for a full return to face-to-face teaching in higher education, but university leaders are keen not to overpromise. Soaring infection rates aside, many staff believe digital initiatives adopted in a state of emergency should be kept as they enhance the student experience.

Large lectures in cavernous theatres will be cut back, as will the traditional three-hour exam. Vice-chancellors say the shift to online assessments has been a positive of the pandemic experience, with universities such as Cambridge and Warwick already announcing their intention to stick with them.

In the long term, many in the sector predict a shift in investment away from shiny and expensive new campuses to the digital estate. Sceptics see it as a way of cutting costs before a further funding squeeze, while universities insist it is not a cheap option.

The immediate challenge will be winning over students, who are craving human contact after spending months learning in their bedrooms. Despite being far more technologically advanced than their institutions, the overwhelming feedback is they want the full campus experience and plenty of face-to-face interaction – just as universities start to move online.

“Some universities are saying some things will be moved permanently online, and there are genuinely some students for whom that’s worked well,” said Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank. “But the difficulty for universities is that students are very keen for the face-to-face stuff to come back. You can only push technology so far. What really matters for students is human beings and having a sense of belonging. If it’s all online you just don’t get that.”

Adam Tickell, the vice-chancellor at Sussex University, said it was too soon to tell what permanent change the pandemic had brought. “My guess is we’re not suddenly going to get a new model overnight. Last March we had a very rapid transformation, and over the course of the last 15 months since the quality of online provision has improved as people have adapted to the technology.

“But there continues to be a very strong rationale for the kind of education we were offering before the pandemic. Obviously seminars and labs are much better when there is a small group of people interacting. But even for lectures, when you are lecturing, every lecture is interactive – you know when you are giving a terrible lecture or a good one because the body language is there, you feed off the students and they feed off you.”

Sheffield Hallam’s vice-chancellor, Chris Husbands, has banned the common phrase “blended learning” from senior leadership discussions to describe a hybrid online and in-person teaching programme . He says the term is “a completely useless way to describe what’s happening” and that universities need a “new language” to describe the future learning experience.

“As long as you say lectures are online, it perpetuates the notion that the entire student experience is online. When students say they want lectures, it’s not that they want to have lectures, they want to go for coffee with their mates after it and talk about it. They want to engage. So what you really need to do is say, how do you most effectively use your campus to stimulate engagement? ” Lectures are in any case “pretty ineffective” for teaching, he added.

“I’ve got some letters from students saying ‘I don’t want to come back on campus’, and I’ve got some letters saying ‘I want to come back a lot’. And the bit I think we are struggling with at the moment is: where can we give choice?”

Husbands acknowledged that value for money would be a key concern for students who have felt short-changed by the lack of in-person teaching. “We’ve had more students raising it with us this year than ever before. I think that there has been a shift in perception, and that’s not going to go away.”

By the time the pandemic hit last year, Northampton University had already embedded a new way of teaching called “active blended learning”, combining online teaching materials with face-to-face education.

“A lot of universities are now only catching up with where we were three or four years ago,” said Northampton’s vice-chancellor, Nick Petford. “Universities and students have got used to the idea of more of a blended online learning approach. Personally I think that’s a good thing. So I would imagine that there’s going to be much more emphasis placed on this in all universities going forward.

“What we are experimenting with now are things like virtual reality and augmented reality for students, particularly in healthcare and nursing. We were going down this route anyway, but Covid has been a big catalyst.”

Petford also predicts the shift online will open up opportunities in the international student market. Instead of having to travel halfway around the world to a UK university, they will be able to study from their home countries, making it a cheaper, more accessible option to more young people. He also foresees a more aggressive market developing from private providers who can charge a cheaper price for a hybrid digital and physical course, leading to increased competition among traditional bricks and mortar universities.

While some universities look ahead to bright, digital futures, others foresee a slow evolution rather than revolution. “I’m not a great believer that there’s going to be some kind of mass revolution in the way universities operate,” said Sir David Bell, the vice-chancellor at Sunderland University. “Partly because we have a tried and tested approach and generally students like it.”

Mary Curnock Cook, a university admissions expert who is chairing an independent commission on students, said there were nerves about freshers’ events in September and fears about “uncorking” social contact among students deprived of it for so long, but socialisation was a vital part of the learning and university experience. On assessments, she predicted “more open book exams, take home exams and projects that students do over a 24-hour period. Universities are realising these can be much more realistic ways of students demonstrating their knowledge and their ability to apply their knowledge.”

Not every university will want to speed ahead with change. “It will be interesting to see how many universities capitalise and amplify the benefits that have been gained from having to work online, and those that find it easier to revert back to pre-Covid practices,” said Curnock Cook. “I really worry that some universities will be heaving a huge sigh of relief and thinking, we can go back to the way we were.”

‘I’d love to have in-person lectures’

Rhian Shillabeer has just finished her second year as an undergraduate at the University of Kent. While she understands why campuses were closed during the pandemic, she’s unhappy that some restrictions will remain into her third and final year.

“I would love to have in-person lectures, but a lot of universities, including Kent now, are saying that some things will be online for the first term at least. They’ve said it might be a blended approach. Politics, my department, is massive, it’s one of the biggest at Kent. For bigger departments like mine there will be online lectures because it’s apparently not safe to have 300 people in a lecture hall, but we can have 30,000 people at Wimbledon. I’m not happy with that at all,” Shillabeer said.

Shillabeer’s second year as a student has been “pretty rubbish”, with no in-person teaching or use of university facilities, while working from home with four others in a “claustrophobic” shared house.

The coming year promises to be better, with in-person seminars and a normal social life promised, despite lectures remaining online. “But if all restrictions are set to end in the middle of July, and I go back in the last week of September, it doesn’t sit right with me that the government can get rid of all restrictions but my university will still have them,” she said.

“To make students pay nearly £10,000 for something universities have a choice whether or not to implement, it’s not fair. I’m not happy to pay that much. In my first year I was happy to pay that much because I was getting everything that was promised to me. But I’m not getting everything that was promised to me this year, even though it could be.”

Shillabeer wrote a letter of protest that gained nearly 300 signatures from her fellow students. “I sent that to the vice-chancellor and high-up people, and I got a response that swept it under the rug. It was: yes we get how you are feeling, bye. There wasn’t any invitation to speak more about it,” she said.