In the Dark

So. The Examination Period at Maynooth University is over and the students are having a bit of a break before we start teaching again next Monday, 31st January. In the meantime we have to finish the examination marking and prepare for the new term. I’ve actually been on campus for part of the last two days, as have a few of my colleagues though there aren’t many students around.

Yesterday we received the expected guidance on how teaching will proceed based on the Government’s decision on Friday to relax most Covid-19 related restrictions. The one big change that I really expected was that large lectures (to audiences of 250+ students) would resume on campus, but it seems that will not happen until half-term. Presumably that’s because many Departments had planned on the basis of these being online and were caught on the hop by the abrupt change. It was at half-term in 2020 that we entered the first lockdown so it will be two full years until we completely re-open (assuming there are no setbacks).

This makes no difference to Theoretical Physics however as we don’t have any classes with more than 250 students in them.

Another thing to have changed is the staggered start of lectures. In the Good Old Days all lectures at Maynooth started at five past the hour and ended at five to and were consequently 50 minutes long. Last term rooms were designated to have lectures starting at 10 past or 5 past and and lectures were reduced in length to 45 minutes so would finish either at 5-to or 10-to. This was to avoid having large numbers of students mingling in foyers and corridors at the start and end of lectures.

Semester 2 will have a full 12 weeks of teaching too, as we won’t miss the first week like we did last term. Hopefully that means Semester 2 will be a bit less rushed than Semester 1; for example in the first year there will be 36 lectures of 50 minutes’ duration (1800 minutes altogether) compared with 33 lectures of 55 minutes (1485 in total), which gives 315 extra minutes – five and a quarter hours – which is about 21%! It seems a lot when put like that. Perhaps we should adjust the weighting of Semester 1 v Semester 2 modules to reflect this?

My biggest worry was a capacity limit on our Computational Physics lab, but with no physical distancing requirement that worry has receded. I’ve decided however that I should still allow any students that want it to attend the lab remotely.

That brings me to the interesting issue. Although officially we are reopening to something near full capacity the question remains as to how many students are comfortable with the new arrangements. Little thought seems to have been given to vulnerable students with underlying health issues and we may find quite a lot of them opting not to return to campus just yet. It is incumbent on us to cater for these students in the best way possible but as yet we don’t know how many there will be in this situation.

This entry was posted on January 25, 2022 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Covid-19, Education, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.