Semester 2 - Phased return communications

Dear all,   Happy New Year! I hope that you managed to have a good holiday wherever you were.   I’m sorry to say that the coronavirus situation in the UK worsened over the Christmas holidays. The case numbers increased considerably due to a mutation that spreads easily. There is now a strict lockdown across all of the country to try to prevent transmission. There is also good news. Vaccinations have begun across the country. These are initially prioritising the people at most risk from coronavirus and key-workers (e.g. hospital staff and careworkers).    As a result of the lockdown, all of the School’s teaching will be fully online until further notice. The semester begins this Monday (11th). So from next week, all of your classes, lectures, office hours, etc will be online. Information about each course will be available on its LEARN page by Monday, including how to access the course materials, videos and how tutorials will run. You also have your personal timetable, the only difference being now that everything is online. You all have taken part in online activity already, in our first week of Semester 1 and because some of our courses during that semester were fully online in any case. The School is closed – both in JCMB and in Appleton Tower – so even if you are in Edinburgh, everything is online.    As I had emailed to you in December, we had hoped you could come come on-campus or study online from Monday. This was pushed back first just before Xmas in an email from Colm Harmon (https://mailings.ed.ac.uk/27JU-1P1GG-32/sv.aspx), and I’m sorry to say is now pushed back further as explained above and as in https://mailings.ed.ac.uk/t/27JU-1P4C3-26CFC85E7F7F8C8E9PXNUEFEAFCF98A16069BB/cr.aspx .    I want to mention three points.   1)     If you have difficulty because you do not have suitable equipment for taking part in online activity, please contact us here - https://teaching.maths.ed.ac.uk/main/undergraduate/studies/equipment - and the School will try to help. We have loaned out hundreds of laptops and tablets, but have more available. [Please do not select the ‘collect from JCMB’ option – we’ll update the form early next week.] There is also discussion within the School and at higher levels in the University about the systematic changes that can be made to ensure that everyone is treated as fairly as possible when final grades are calculated, given that the choice of hybrid teaching is unavailable now.    2)    I know that a number of you are in Edinburgh right now. It is a shame that we cannot offer any hybrid activity currently. But we are going to be working out how to how best to support your learning and time in the city when any mandated lockdown finishes. The University has a site that allows you to update your location  - https://www.ed.ac.uk/students/welcome-back/continuing-your-studies/location-tracker – it would be really helpful if you could keep that up-to-date, so that we can feed this in to understand how best to support everyone.      3)    We will have three routes to communicate with all of the School’s students. Each will carry the same messages. They will be: email (like this one); the internet at https://teaching.maths.ed.ac.uk/main/teaching2020 (where this message will be put); and a weekly meeting run by Stuart King, the Director of Teaching, or myself, where we can explain what is happening and also get information from you about things we should be addressing or considering. The first of the weekly meetings will be next week on Wednesday afternoon on Zoom, and the details are below. We have been in touch with the MathSoc and will try to address questions that they have brought to us, but you may have your own.    I am afraid that I do not know how long “until further notice” is going to mean and it will be determined by a number of public health factors, including of course UK and Scottish government decisions. The only definitive information currently is that the full lockdown in Scotland is until the end of January. It would seem to me quite likely to expect strong restrictions in place at least until after Flexible Learning Week (which follows Week 5 of the semester) and perhaps for longer. We will be concentrating hard on making the online world as good as possible, and using everything we learnt last semester.    To close, please do remember how you can get in touch with the School: as well as your Personal Tutors you can speak to the Student Support Officers if you are worried about anything (studentsupport@maths.ed.ac.uk); to the teaching office mto@ed.ac.uk for general teaching questions; to your Programme Directors (Nicole Augustin – Statistics; Joerg Kalcsics – OR; David Siska – Finance; Kostas Zygalakis – CAM) and of course you can always write to me hosmaths@ed.ac.uk.   Take care of yourself and those around you!   Best,  Iain

Dear all,   Happy New Year! I hope that you managed to have a good holiday wherever you were.   I’m sorry to say that the coronavirus situation in the UK worsened over the Christmas holidays. The case numbers increased considerably due to a mutation that spreads easily. There is now a strict lockdown across all of the country to try to prevent transmission. There is also good news. Vaccinations have begun across the country. These are initially prioritising the people at most risk from coronavirus and key-workers (e.g. hospital staff and careworkers).    As a result of the lockdown, all of the School’s teaching will be fully online until further notice. The semester begins this Monday (11th). So from next week, all of your classes, lectures, office hours, etc will be online. Information about each course will be available on its LEARN page by Monday, including how to access the course materials, videos and how tutorials will run. You also have your personal timetable, the only difference being now that everything is online. You all have taken part in online activity already, in our first week of Semester 1 and because some of our courses during that semester were fully online in any case. The School is closed – both in JCMB and in Appleton Tower – so even if you are in Edinburgh, everything is online. [You should also have received an email from Colm Harmon about this https://mailings.ed.ac.uk/t/27JU-1P4C3-26CFC85E7F7F8C8E9PXNUEFEAFCF98A16069BB/cr.aspx .] 

I want to mention three points. 1)    If you have difficulty because you do not have suitable equipment for taking part in online activity, please contact us here - https://teaching.maths.ed.ac.uk/main/undergraduate/studies/equipment - and the School will try to help. We have loaned out hundreds of laptops and tablets, but have more available. [Please do not select the ‘collect from JCMB’ option – we’ll update the form early next week.] There is also discussion within the School and at higher levels in the University about the systematic changes that can be made to ensure that everyone is treated as fairly as possible when final grades are calculated, given that the choice of hybrid teaching is unavailable now.  2)    I know that a number of you are in Edinburgh right now. It is a shame that we cannot offer any hybrid activity currently. But we are going to be working out how to how best to support your learning and time in the city when any mandated lockdown finishes. The University has a site that allows you to update your location  - https://www.ed.ac.uk/students/welcome-back/continuing-your-studies/location-tracker – it would be really helpful if you could keep that up-to-date, so that we can feed this in to understand how best to support everyone. 3)    We will have three routes to communicate with all of the School’s students. Each will carry the same messages. They will be: email (like this one); the internet at https://teaching.maths.ed.ac.uk/main/teaching2020 (where this message will be put); and a weekly meeting run by Stuart King, the Director of Teaching, or myself, where we can explain what is happening and also get information from you about things we should be addressing or considering. The first of the weekly meetings will be next week on Wednesday afternoon on Zoom, and the details are below. We have been in touch with the MathSoc and will try to address questions that they have brought to us, but you may have your own.    I am afraid that I do not know how long “until further notice” is going to mean and it will be determined by a number of public health factors, including of course UK and Scottish government decisions. The only definitive information currently is that the full lockdown in Scotland is until the end of January. It would seem to me quite likely to expect strong restrictions in place at least until after Flexible Learning Week (which follows Week 5 of the semester) and perhaps for longer. We will be concentrating hard on making the online world as good as possible, and using everything we learnt last semester.    To close, please do remember how you can get in touch with the School: as well as your Personal Tutors you can speak to the Student Support Officers if you are worried about anything (studentsupport@maths.ed.ac.uk); to the teaching office mto@ed.ac.uk for general teaching questions; and of course you can always write to me hosmaths@ed.ac.uk.

Take care of yourself and those around you!   Best,  Iain