For me, this is the paragraph that exemplifies the (this) total failure of senior university management. Has any VC, at any stage, sought to make a pedagogical case for online learning? If I can argue from anecdote, let’s look at the work my Evidence students are doing this year.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been lucky to see four students in a nominally twelve-person seminar, at any stage in the whole module. Lecture attendance has generally been about 50%. Very few people have used my office hours or even emailed me until a month before the exam.

Last week was week two of this year’s course. About 100 out of 150 students completed an entirely optional task where they posted a 200-word mini essay to the discussion board. About 50 wrote thoughtful comments on other students’ work. And what they wrote was generally great.

I’m very fortunate in that the vast majority of my teaching is with third years. I appreciate that this changes things, and that remote teaching for first years is an entirely different proposition. Everyone teaching first years this year (really any year) is undoubtedly a hero.

But there’s very obviously something about online delivery that is working, and that is allowing far more students to meaningfully engage than would ever normally be the case. There’s certainly lots I’ve learned this year that will make me better at the teaching part of my job.

Obviously I don’t want to be in the position every year of taking two hours to record and tidy up every thirty-minute segment of lecture time. But it would be really nice if some VC, somewhere, could get off their arse and make the positive case for online learning.