Thread by @profdanhicks

University lecturers and tutors are the pedagogical experts here. If an academic wishes to plan and deliver their teaching online, to deliver the best possible student experience of teaching in their judgement then university managers shouldn't seek to prevent them from doing so.

I'm incredibly lucky to have the full support from my Head of Department for my personal wish to plan for teaching fully online for this academic year — in my case for certainty above anything. Many friends and colleagues across the HE sector, however, are not in that position.

I love teaching and I sorely miss lecturing to a live audience. But there's loads of innovation happening in online teaching, especially since March. I want to embrace that and properly plan for the best possible content - not expect to just repeat what I did in previous years.

Same goes for public lectures—another thing I love doing in person! I'll be doing a fully virtual book tour for my new book in November-January, hosted by communities across the world, and again I'm trying to embrace and maximise the potential benefits of this horrible situation

Digital teaching platforms are relentlessly naff. Let's make the 2020-21 academic year a time for bringing online teaching, with all its potential benefits, into the 21st century. It'll never replace face to face teaching. But let's grasp this opportunity to evolve it.

And as well as teaching, despite all the horror of these times, my supervision of my current research students has evolved in some really interesting and I believe v positive ways: more informal & geniunely two-way, a new blend of seminars & one-to-one, a different pace & energy

This wasn't intended as a thread but here we are.
So let me just add that how @littlegaudy and I are planning this upcoming @CloreLeadership workshop places the potential of digital/social media at its heart—as we could do for all teaching in these times