Tuesday, 5 May

17:05

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has started the second week of remote teaching. We want to acknowledge your work and the fact that all of this is taking place under complex personal circumstances.

In terms of our students, we keep monitoring their participation on Vula to identify those who might need extra help. Students who are not engaging with their work need to be contacted to identify the obstacles in their way and hopefully remove as many of those obstacles as possible.

The main concern of the past week has been the slow delivery of laptops to identified students, the distribution of which is currently scheduled for completion by Friday, 8 May. The UCT executive met with the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) to discuss the anxieties that this delay has been causing for students who are expected to submit work for their courses or write tests.

The university would like to appeal to everyone, as people, to be compassionate in our approach to students. Please be flexible in managing deadlines for those students who will only be joining your courses from Monday, 11 May. We are also hoping to start with the delivery of distance learning materials by Monday, 11 May.

As Term 2 progresses, faculties are starting to discuss assessment in the context of remote teaching. The Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) is working with faculty-based teaching and learning teams to support decisions about modalities of assessment.

For those of you who would like to slowly start thinking of the work ahead, you can get help from CILT to review your current courses to help improve you and your students’ experience in Term 3.

Read the DVC’s Desk.