A guest post by a group of Sussex UCU members
who've been reflecting on the move to online teaching
By taking our teaching online, we hope to act in solidarity with our students whose education and wellbeing we care so deeply about. But we do so both while our workloads and personal responsibilities escalate with our collective attempts to live, and support others in living, through the Covid-19 pandemic, and at a moment that follows years of efforts to use new technologies in ways that do not always align with our interests as university workers.
When taking our teaching online, we want to be mindful of the issues surrounding workload and health, surveillance, appropriation of intellectual property, job security, the future of effective collective action, contracted hours, class sizes, and the quality of education, which are all at play here. Teaching online introduces a distinct array of accessibility issues that need to be taken into account.
To help our colleagues and students navigate this new landscape in a way that prioritises their physical and mental health, as well as their rights as workers, a group of Sussex UCU members has created a document offering assistance to colleagues who have been asked to undertake online teaching, possibly for the first time.
We have collected the following articles in the hope that they might help us as we move forward. This is a living document; please feel free to add suggestions.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xJ6wFdZi4Y6gZdq954DRLE_YrJuANhLCHiLO4ATO-WQ/edit