Covid: Online teaching to stay, say university leaders

Students in higher education will learn better with parts of some courses continuing to be taught online, university leaders in Wales have said.

Swansea University vice-chancellor Prof Paul Boyle said students would benefit from the "blended approach" to learning used during the coronavirus pandemic.

Cardiff University's Prof Colin Riordan said "some things work better online, especially some large lectures".

They were addressing the House of Commons' Welsh Affairs Committee.

Committee chair and Conservative Preseli Pembrokeshire MP Stephen Crabb asked Prof Boyle if a permanent move to delivering some teaching electronically raised questions about the value for money for students.

"I actually think the provision we will have going into the future will be better for students, rather than worse," he replied.

Prof Boyle said the "assumption that this blended approach, somehow will be not quite as good as we used to have when it was all face-to-face" was wrong.

"We will have a better provision, where we will choose carefully what can be done more effectively online, but really make use of the time that we have available for the other types of learning where students really get the most benefit from smaller class sizes, from interacting more closely to their tutors and other academics," he said.

"I'm convinced that what we need to do as we go forward is project to that community of students what a valuable education they're going to get as a result of the changes that we've learned we can now accommodate."

Prof Boyle told MPs there were also "real opportunities to collaborate across institutions" with teaching.

"We now have the opportunity to do that much more flexibly, because we can now use online measures to bring academics from Aberystwyth into Swansea, from Bangor into Cardiff and so on," he said.

"So there are all sorts of opportunities that open up to us now, in a way that perhaps did exist before the pandemic but we weren't taking advantage of them in the way that perhaps we could have done."

Asked by Mr Crabb if students would be "dialling in via Zoom for their lectures in perpetuity now?" Prof Riordan said: "I think that elements of it certainly will stay because what we've show is that we actually can deliver whole elements of degree programmes, certainly one-and-a-half years of them, via remote means and we can achieve the learning outcomes."

However, he added: "Students clearly still want the on campus experience, they're very, very keen to be back.

"Our students have been in Cardiff, many of them on campus and attending lessons, depending on the subject, throughout the pandemic.

"But what we have learned is what is possible and that some things do work better online, especially some of the large lectures."

Prof Riordan said there was now the ability "to devise new programmes for new sets of students we wouldn't have been able to access before".

"So I think there's a recognition that a combination of in person and remote learning is now possible.

"And you can go either in one direction where nearly everything is in person, which you'd expect from medicine and dental. that kind of thing, or you could be putting on new programmes in data science or something like that, which which is entirely online, if you want to do that."

On Wednesday, Wales' Education Minister Jeremy Miles said he wanted to scrap 2m social distancing and have larger contact groups in adult education this autumn, to increase in-person learning, as long as the Covid risk was low or moderate.