In an email to undergraduate students today, the School of Law finalised its official teaching plans for the Autumn trimester. Some of the plans include a rotating system of groups of 50 students attending lectures according to a rota that will be posted on Brightspace. As well as this, students will be required to bring cleaning materials to wipe down their desks before and after lectures.
The Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher, stated in the email that “the principles that inform the approach of the Sutherland School are: safety, rigour, compassion and agility.” Students were also informed that the School have designed the plan “so that, if needs be, we can shift to being entirely online with minimal disruption”.
In a document attached to the email, the School outlined its plans. All tutorials for stage 1 and stage 2 students will be livestreamed online. The School assured that most lectures and seminars will be taught face-to-face and where a class consists of less than 50 students, they will meet weekly. However, if the class consists of more than 50 students, students will be put into groups of 50 who will attend on-campus lectures according to a rota to be posted on Brightspace.
The plan noted “the larger your lectures, the less time you will have on campus.” All assessment will be conducted online, even if the public health guidelines ease. For each module, students can expect to attend 1-2 times in the semester. A provisional timetable has been provided with reading week to take place from the 26th of October to the 30th of October. The revision and assessment period is from the 7th of December to the 23rd of December.
Incoming undergraduate students will begin one week later than other students, on the 28th of September and will have a reading week during the same period as other students. An extra week of teaching may occur from the 7th of December to the 11th of December if there is no terminal assessment and official end-of-trimester assessment is to begin on the 14th of December until the 23rd of December.
The document continues to inform students that “UCD’s approach is that students and staff are personally responsible for cleaning whatever classroom spaces they use themselves”. Students are being asked to bring cleaning materials with them in addition to masks.
The document states that “UCD’s expectations are that students will take advantage of as much the on-campus experience as possible” and emphasised that the principle “is one of blended learning – not an exclusively online trimester.”
Other Schools in the University are yet to release official teaching plans.
Mahnoor Choudhry – Assistant News Editor
