Friday, August 21, 2020

Independent SAGE guidance on online university teaching

The Independent Sage committee released guidance for universities [link to press release] today. The full report is here. I've not read it (yet at least), but the 'headlines' include the following recommendation:

"Universities are urged to make online teaching the ‘default option’.... Online classes should be used exclusively for first two weeks of term".

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Unpaid marking

 Controversy has broken out in Australia over piece-rate payment for marking university assignments. It seems that some staff are being encouraged to skim-read essays in order to get through the work required within the allocated budget. The alternative, of course, is working without pay in order to do the job properly.

Monday, August 17, 2020

Pandemic Ethics

Ben Bramble has just released an open-access book on Pandemic Ethics.

I plan to spend a week of my ethics of public policy module on something to do with Covid-19. I don't know whether it will just be about vaccines (either mandatory vaccination and/or rationing) or whether I'll extend it to issues such as facemasks and lockdowns. This may depend on how much time I have to read around the fast-appearing literature. It looks like this would be useful for the reading list in either case.