17 March 2020 - Coronavirus (Covid-19) bulletin for ucisa members - attendance monitoring, support for ucisa members from Microsoft, WonkHE article
Attendance monitoring/ Tier 4 compliance during Covid-19 – ucisa liaison with UUK
You may recall that a member institution had advised ucisa that that some of their students had expressed concern about using digital/ biometric attendance recording facilities at the current time, because of potential for contamination. Recognising that there may be implications for Tier 4 attendance monitoring, ucisa liaised with Universities UK for guidance. They advised that institutions to revisit page 68 of the Sponsorship Duties document of the Tier 4 guidance. This page covers options for expected contacts.
Update from Microsoft for ucisa members (including training for institutions)
Microsoft have advised ucisa that they now have a public facing site that brings together their resources to support customers moving to remote learning. Microsoft’s recommended solution to move to remote learning is Teams.
Office 365 A1 is free for Education and the majority of customers have access to this or one of the paid suites (A3 / A5). For customers that need help to deploy and get set up, Microsoft has extended FastTrack has support for every customer.
Microsoft has set up a Remote Learning Community to help bring people together to learn from peers and share global best practice and are running a series of webinars to help customers make the shift to remote learning with Teams. Some webinars are on demand, others are scheduled. The first, “Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff” is scheduled for today, 17 March at 3pm (registration required).
Using technology to cope with Covid-19 on (or off) campus – WonkHE article by ucisa Trustee, Arthur Clune
On Friday, WonkHE published an article from ucisa outlining some of the key areas academics and professional services staff will need to consider as classes move online and many colleagues in the sector move to remote working.
