Pandemics, PhDs and pedagogy

An update

Well, it turns out blogging is still not my forte 2.5 years on. My word has that gone fast. A lot has happened since my last post, but here are the high (and low) lights!

I miss Robin Williams.

PhD students

First of all, the good news. I have two PhD students! In 2020, I was awarded a PhD studentship from the National Centre for the 3Rs (NC3Rs) in 2019, which aims to develop machine learning techniques for detection of welfare anomalies from videos. My student - Ezechukwu (Israel) Nwokedi - has already made great strides towards this goal and will be presenting his early work at the CVPR workshop “CV4Animals”! More details on this project can be found here and here.

I was also the recipient of a PhD studentship through the EPSRC Doctoral Partnership. This project is focused on weakly supervised learning for lesion segmentation, with emphasis on multi-sequence MR images of brain tumours. This work is being undertaken by former Lincoln undergraduate/MSc student Joshua Mckone. He too has made great progress and is aiming the submit a manuscript on his work to date fairly soon.

Needless to say I’m really impressed with both Josh and Israel. They are great students, and I’ve really enjoyed working out how to be a PhD supervisor with them. They’ve yet to even see their PhD office on campus, the poor souls. As such, I look forward to properly welcoming them back to the university soon, along with two new lab members! More on that in October…

The pandemic

It’s June 2021, and we find ourselves riding a not insignifcant 3rd wave of COVID-19 cases in the UK. Recent data, however, is encouraging. The Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines appear to be highly (~95%) effective against hospitalisation after two doses, and the UK public has been astonishingly forthcoming about getting their jabs so far. I myself have had one jab, and have managed to bring my 2nd forward to early August. It feels like there’s some light at the end of this tunnel.

However, the impact of the COVID-19 on humanity cannot be overstated. Way back in April 2020, I said to my wife something along the lines of “if we recover from this, society will never be the same again”. As pessimistic as this might sound, I stand by those words and on some level I hope that I’m right. The pandemic has laid bare some very broken systems and thrown many social inequalities into sharp relief. The effects will be felt in many communities for years to come, and I can only hope that this episode in our history is not quickly forgotten.

The HE sector is one that is in dire need of a rethink. Without getting on my high horse about marketisation, the pandemic has made quite clear to everybody that something drastic needs to change in the way universities are funded. Their armour is down, and their weak point has been revealed like a giant red eye on the back of boss in the Legend of Zelda: accommodation fees. And when the pandemic attacked, universities were rightly worried about how they would survive. While most have survived so far, it has not been without cost. I could go on, but for now I’ll just leave this here.

"Watch out!"

Pedagogy

It has also become increasingly clear to me that the “300 students in an amphitheatre” model of teaching will not (and should not) return any time soon. My institution has been quite receptive to online delivery this time around, giving module leaders autonomy* over how their modules ought to delivered next year (* sort of). Neverthless, this newfangled notion of “blended learning” will take some getting used to. I have personally been vocally opposed to face-to-face teaching throughout the pandemic, while at the same time finding online teaching to be wholly unsatisfying. While I feel that I’ve done the topics justice, it’s simply not the same. Not one of my students has ever turned on their webcam during a lecture, and thus there are literally hundreds of students whose faces I’ve never seen, even after having taught them for over a year. I miss walking around the lecture theatre and making eye contact with those who’ve been engaging in the material. I miss the little chats with students during the break. I even miss spending 10 minutes trying to find the register that’s been unceremiously dropped on the floor.

"Any questions?"

Like many of my colleagues in HE, I’ve never been formally trained as a teacher. I don’t hold any teaching qualifications, and my first year of blended learning has relied on some on-the-job training. Being a CS person, the tools aren’t the problem per se (althought they are problematic, but I’ll save that for another time), the problem is that the feedback one tends to get is that “the module was fine, under the circumstances”. This raises the question, how do we make online teaching & learning better, irrespective of circumsances? Well for one thing, I need a break. And then once I’m back and feeling refreshed, I’ll start to think about it.