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Dear students,

As the number of cases of COVID-19 has increased and become more widespread we have taken the decision to move our classroom teaching online.

From Wednesday morning (18 March), all teaching of this type – which includes face-to-face lectures, seminars and tutorials – will be suspended as we transition to online provision. This means that any scheduled classes and lectures that you have will not be offered Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Then on Monday 23 March, we will begin delivering our classroom teaching and lectures online. The online delivery will include any material missed as a result of the suspension of teaching activities this week. This will carry on until we break up on Friday 3 April.

The campus will remain open and the library, food and drink outlets and other buildings will remain open and available. The library will open between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-6pm on Sunday, but please keep an eye out for details of the opening hours of other buildings.

Workshops and practical sessions will continue as scheduled this week and studios and laboratories will remain open for students requiring those facilities. But there will be no more classroom-based teaching or lecturing until further notice.

We know that many of you have been asking for this for a number of days and we are pleased that we are now in a position to announce this move.

We are also ensuring that we follow national guidelines in everything that we do, which has meant that decisions like this – which are some of the biggest a university can make – are made with full consideration of all the evidence and information we have available.

We have also decided to suspend attendance monitoring for all students (home/EU and overseas) from today, Monday 16 March. What this means is that if you have any concerns about your health or those of your family, you can return home and put those priorities first without worrying about the impact on your attendance record.

We will also be exploring in more detail how we can adjust learning and assessment timelines and processes where necessary to ensure that students are able to progress and graduate at the appropriate time.

You will almost certainly have further questions about the detail of all this and I want to assure you that we will give regular updates as more information becomes available. As we prepare for Monday, we will expand and improve our FAQ pages and we will be making other forms of support available as well. We will let you know what to expect for the last two weeks before the holiday ahead of Monday.

We understand that this is a worrying and challenging time for you all and recognise the anxiety many of you may be feeling. I hope the above information at least gives you some certainty about the immediate future. Please be assured that we will continue to do what we can in what is for us all a difficult and unprecedented set of challenges. 

If you have any questions, do let us know on infooncoronavirus@dmu.ac.uk.

Andy

Professor Andy Collop

Interim Vice-Chancellor