Academics and prominent educationists have insisted universities must “come clean” about the amount of online learning they are delivering.
According to a letter signed by university professors and staff, including David Palfreyman fellow of New College, Oxford, and a board member of the Office for Students, hundreds of thousands of students could be “unknowingly” signing up for courses, unaware of how many hours will be taught online.
The letter, addressed to the universities minister Robert Halfon, calls on the Government to consider forcing UCAS, the universities’ admission service, to publish comparable contact hours data for courses.
A campaigner who co-ordinated the letter with UsForThem, the parents’ campaign group, Paul Wiltshire, said universities need to “come clean” about the extent to which lectures are delivered online so that students don’t “end up inadvertently on a course … which actively encourages them to spend time alone in their bedrooms.”
The signatories of the letter, including Roger Motson, professor of surgery at Anglia Ruskin University, and Sean Frost, lecturer of biomedical science at Hull University, are also calling on ministers to investigate why the higher education sector is “largely ignoring” guidance from the competition watchdog issued in 2015 that requires providers to publish, “the number and type of contact hours that students can expect. One of the legacies … of the Covid lockdowns is that a significant number of universities have now changed their teaching delivery models to include on-line teaching as a permanent feature,” it states.
The letter argues that “online teaching … is fundamentally different to face-to-face teaching delivered in a lecture hall or seminar room”, and students should be given an “explicit choice”. Emeritus professor of education at Derby University, Dennis Hayes, said: “What we have lost is the real educational experience [of] on-campus learning.”
“Students are clear that online teaching can make their experience more accessible and flexible and enhance digital skills employers value” said a spokesman for Universities UK, which represents 140 institutions in the UK.