What's working like for you?
Thursday, 07 May 2020
The coronavirus lockdown has changed the way we work individually, with our own teams and with other teams at the University. Whether we are working from home or are working on the campus, each of us is adapting in our own way to these changed circumstances. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we will share the experience of some of our colleagues.
Jane Setter is a Professor of Phonetics in the School for Literature and Languages and Director of Academic Tutoring for that School. Jane teaches on the both undergraduate and post graduate degrees in the Department of English Language & Applied Linguistics.
We asked Jane how the lockdown had affected her work:
“I had to be in self-isolation before the general lockdown began as my husband had coronavirus-like symptoms, so have been doing all my teaching online since mid-March. There are certainly challenges to this way of working but the University has acknowledged this and put systems in place that work. I’m happy working with different technologies and have been using flipped learning for some of my teaching since 2013, but I appreciate that not all colleagues will be as at home with this way of teaching and the technology involved. I’ve helped colleagues in the Department new to using Blackboard Collaborate with things like screen sharing, opening a whiteboard, etc. It’s been good to get to know Blackboard better and support colleagues by sharing my experience.
“We’ve been holding Confirmation of Registration meetings for PhD students in the Department through Teams. This meeting is for candidates at the end of their first year of their PhD to monitor progress and ensure that they can go on to carry out independent research successfully. As such, it’s an important step along the way and so it was useful to know that the technology could work successfully. I’ve also been giving one-to-one supervision to my PhD students remotely using Teams. I’m experimenting with how best to supervise Masters’ students and give undergraduate students support in the run up to exams.
“Although I live in the countryside and the walks around here are lovely, I do miss being on our beautiful campus, which I can’t do much to replicate. And I miss seeing colleagues from the Department in the coffee room; I’ve been joining professional networks online to compensate for this. It seems like a long time already from when my husband and I went into self-isolation, but I feel that we came through that successfully and we’re taking it one day at a time. We haven’t fallen out yet!”
To enable as many people as possible to share their experience the Internal Communications team has developed a storyboard, so if you’d like to take part, contact the Internal Communications team and a member of the team will guide you through the process. These will form a series of articles on what new ways of working have been like for colleagues as well as offering practical advice, hints and tips on how to manage this.