Read on Twitter
This 'popular' tweet has managed to cram some red herrings and half fibs together. It might look like common sense, but it's not - it fabricates a false situation and conflates some unrelated issues.
A thread.
1/ https://twitter.com/berniespofforth/status/1351118505282842626
A thread.
1/ https://twitter.com/berniespofforth/status/1351118505282842626
The OU has experience of distance learning - it's awesome for so many reasons - but the comparison is flawed.
Fib 1: OU fees are £3K a year for part time study, and £6K a year for full time. £9K fees (UK govt policy, remember) are for full-time study.
2/ http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding
Fib 1: OU fees are £3K a year for part time study, and £6K a year for full time. £9K fees (UK govt policy, remember) are for full-time study.
2/ http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding
OU courses are distance learning from the outset, across the whole degree, and been set up in this way. This means that the nature of the campus, and the nature and form of the services and facilities offered, are different.
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Other unis have had to convert their teaching to distance, often at very short notice because the government has managed the overall situation really badly, and in terms of education; it's dropped unis (and schools) in it.
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Some online/distance teaching may be less than ideal particularly if students were expecting F2F (and if the courses were originally designed for that), but uni staff are doing the best they can. Expecting OU degrees is unfair/unrealistic - many haven't had the time/training.
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Fib 2: Is there anywhere that has 'no online content'? Almost certainly not - even before the pandemic, universities were already using VLEs such as Moodle/Blackboard etc. Also libraries etc have a lot of online/remote access.
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Red Herring 1: Strike action is unrelated to the pandemic; staff are being screwed over by the uni system: systematically overworked, and many of our pensions are under threat. That, in this context, staff have worked even harder, is testament to how dedicated they are.
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Red Herring 2: VC salaries probably should be high: if they had similar levels of responsibility in the for-profit sector, they'd be doubled, tripled - or more. The problem is that their pay goes up, often with little oversight, while staff are being underpaid and overworked.
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On refunds: We're doing the best we can, and things could have been better - but overall perhaps not under these conditions. If we do refunds which are not state funded (and this is their mess after all), universities will go into the red, staff will lose their jobs.
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