IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021 - 51

thousands of phone calls every day, to check on
the students' status and inform them of PKU's
COVID-19 prevention measures and alternative
modes of teaching. Our staff have been paying extra
attention to students with mental health problems.
For those students from families with financial difficulties,
our staff sent them computers and mobile
phones and purchased internet provision for them,
to ensure they have no difficulty accessing internet.
Our university requires the tutors of all faculties
and departments to have one-on-one communication
with those students preparing for graduation,
helping them with their studies, providing guidance
on thesis writing, and defence. This year, we put
additional efforts to offer more job opportunities and
released over 100,000 job vacancies, which was a
considerable increase to last year and ensured graduate
employment rate this year was at the same level
as previous years.
LR: We've had similar issues here in the U.K., and
especially so at the start of the new academic year,
when we have been so concerned to support our
arriving first-year students as they settle into university
life at such an unusual time. My role as Dean of
an Oxford college means that my main responsibility
is to make sure that the college environment is such
that it promotes the health and well-being of all our
students. So, my concern is not so much with their
academic work-that's the responsibility of some
of my colleagues. Rather, my responsibility is with
the students' well-being, as well as dealing with their
behavior, when it may be falling short of what we
would like it to be.
So, I've been deeply involved in thinking about
how we best prepare our college to keep our students,
first of all, safe in terms of infection in line with all
the government guidelines and our responsibilities
to public health. But at the same time, how do we
try to mitigate those restrictive circumstances somewhat,
so that our students can feel as though they're
getting that really important experience of being at
university? Because the schools in the U.K. have been
closed since March, the majority of our first-year students
were just so delighted to be here; to be back in
full-time education was for them a huge thing.
Part of my role is helping the students to understand
that their experience, although very different in
some ways, isn't different in other ways, despite the
pandemic. Over the summer vacation, we worked
very closely with our existing students to build a very
June 2021
strong network of support amongst the students themselves,
and so we consulted with our undergraduates
and postgraduates at every point, gaining their cooperation
and their input into our planning. We have
what is called " Peer Supporters " within each college,
and these are fellow students to whom other students
can turn as a kind of " first port of call " if they're having
any anxieties. We've also been much more proactive
in reaching out to our students, asking them what difficulties
they're facing, asking how can we help with
that, reassuring them that we're here to help, and
offering some practical solutions that we might be
able to help them with, and pointing them towards
other kinds of support that we can offer.
So, it's a cooperative and collaborative effort that
is ongoing at the moment, with weekly meetings
among our pastoral support team. This term, we
have been acutely conscious that we have students
moving in and out of isolation, so are addressing
ourselves to supporting them on a practical level,
but also on an academic level-how to ensure they
can carry on with their learning even though they
may be isolating. We know very well that no one
can separate their academic and personal lives, the
two are absolutely connected. So, we put the systems
in place to ensure that we can be alert much
sooner to any academic issues that might be coming
up and then think immediately about whether
that might be connected to something else that's
going on, and vice versa.
SW: I am very glad to hear that so much collective
effort has been going into supporting students' pastoral
needs, and of course our top priority is providing
them with the best learning experience and enabling
them to achieve the greatest outcome of their university
study. At the same time, I don't want to overlook
the massive pressures accumulating on professors
and teachers, on the education provider's side. How
has this pandemic impacted our own capacities-
practical, physical, mental, and emotional? This is a
wide and powerful topic, but one which I think has
not been talked about very much.
HS: Since my own work setting is the Center for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning, we did not
experience so much mental or emotional pressure
ourselves. My understanding is that the greatest sense
of pressure for our faculty members was how to teach
online. For example, how to teach without a blackboard
is a real challenge for faculties of the School
of Mathematical Science. For them, how to write on
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021

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