UPDATE: This article was updated
Staff at the College of Arts and Social Sciences received an email on Friday afternoon stating that they must begin to prepare for the imminent move to online courses as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts campus further. The email follows an announcement by the Vice-Chancellor to suspend all public events at the ANU while essential university activities, such as classes and staff admin, would continue to operate as normal.
The email details that access to campus would soon be limited with distancing measures, including not congregating in groups of more than 10 people, would soon be in place. Three possible solutions were suggested to staff for online learning:
- Adapting courses to full online delivery, acquitted in the typical semester 1 timeframe.
- Adapting courses to partial online delivery with a deferred on-campus component
- Deferring course delivery
The College emphasised that the first option, where courses would be adapted for complete online delivery, was the preferred option, and they believed that it would be easily done for many CASS courses, without increasing academic load. CASS recommended against the deferral of courses, as it would create ‘extreme logistical issues at a later date’.
There are also unconfirmed reports that staff at the College of Engineering and Computer Science received a similar email.
Staff were directed to continue to liaise with their Head of School, and school administrators to find the strategies that would work best for their course.
Woroni reached out to the ANUSA college representatives for each college, the CASS, CAP, COL, CECS and JCOS representatives said that they had not heard any information regarding the proposed moves to online teaching methods. All reiterated that if any student had issues with the process to move to online teaching that they would be more than willing to help where they could.
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