Who would have believed that we would be delivering our university education completely online and for the transition to have taken just a week to complete! Suddenly we are all experts at Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Blackboard Collaborate, pick a platform, any will do, liaising with staff and students like we have always been working this way. Of course, we have amazing teams, pulling out all of the stops to make this happen, but for a creative education there is a whole host of challenges to work through. How do you continue to teach location based film production, technical workshops or live theatrical group performances? There is no doubt that we have learnt so much in the last few days and the creative education pedagogy that will be shared will be ; Which is why we are hosting a 1 day seminar to discuss what we have learnt on the 6th of October.

Questions have arisen, like are there copyright/intellectual property right issues sharing material on platforms? Not all students have access to the high level professional software for games and animation courses or the broadband speeds to handle large files, how are we handling this?

Every course has a distinct personality. Our games students are perhaps more practiced at being in front of a computer all day working, but our drama students feed off the energy of a live environment, so balancing the cohorts needs both in terms of academic and pastoral has relied on out staff really understanding the make-up of their cohorts. What is going on in the world is overwhelming for us all, but even more so if you are an international student away from home and unable to get a flight back. How do we juggle both pastoral and educational deadlines?

And do we want to move completely back to the way things were just because we can? For some modules the online ‘flipped classroom’ approach works really well, for example Scriptwriting, so should we not be too hasty to revert back to the way things were just because we can?