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Heads of Department Message 16 April

All

I hope everyone is well and that you had a decent break over the Easter weekend. It has been a relatively quiet week, but just a few points to update:

On Campus Events

I’m sure that this will come as no surprise, but UEB Gold yesterday confirmed that there will be no further student or applicant group events on campus from now until 31 July inclusive. So, all recruitment and related activity and engagement with existing students will remain virtual.

STP

In my last update I mentioned the potential for finding new opportunities for STP tutors whose planned contact time for the coming term would not be taking place. We are hearing from UCU the suggestion that many STP tutors do not know what is happening this coming term and don’t know what might be required of them. I suspect that this maybe small numbers only rather than a widespread problem, but I’d be grateful if you could check whether your STP tutors have been told about what to expect in term 3. And in terms of opportunities for STP tutors, you will probably be aware of the Warwick Online Learning Certificate (see below), but just incase you aren’t, this is something that could be highlighted to STP tutors.

Warwick Online Learning Certificate: opportunity for PGR online tutors (this is the message shared via Faculty Education Committees)

Term 3 will see the launch of the Warwick Online Learning Certificate, a Moodle-based online course offered to all first year undergraduates. This programme is designed to equip students for online study, enhance their knowledge of Warwick online tools and approaches, and develop wider skills and understandings, for example, in relation to employability.

To support the success of this course, we are seeking to employ a group of PGR teachers to work across this 5 week programme (5 hours per week), supporting students and engaging with them in the online domain. Online tutors will act in a facilitative role and are not expected to be experts on the weekly content. Rather, they will positively monitor student progress and development through interactions in Moodle. Guidance and training will be provided from the cohort leads who have developed the course (3 hours paid training). We are seeking PGRs with recent teaching experience and welcome applications from across the University.

Full job specification and application information is available here: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/od/academic-development/app/pgr/wolconlinetutors/

The timescale to apply is very short and only those who know they can be available to start work imminently should apply for this role:

  • Application deadline: Sunday 19th April, 5pm

Requests for Business Critical Posts

If you are making requests for posts to be approved as “Business Critical”, please can you ensure that you have asked your Departmental Finance Adviser for comments prior to providing the case to your VP/CoF. This will make the process run a bit more smoothly and avoid the need for separate requests for information being made back to Finance when we review these cases.

Furlough

We continue to work on opportunities to us the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and we have thus far furloughed around 900 jobs . All colleagues who are furloughed will received full pay (with the University topping up the 80% that is provided by Government). We continue to explore options for this scheme in order to help us manage our cost base.

Many thanks everyone – appreciate all the hard work that’s going in to keeping things moving – and they are moving! It looks like we have another 3 weeks, at least, of the current working and living arrangements. I guess that won’t be a surprise to anyone and this will continue to challenge us all; but so far what has been achieved is really impressive and I know we can keep things going for a bit longer.

Stay well!

Cheers

Chris

Professor Christine Ennew OBE