Dear teachers,
As the school year draws to a close, we would like to thank you once again for all you have done. This has been a challenging year because of the pandemic, and you’ve had to be very flexible and resourceful. Thanks to your efforts, our students continued to receive an excellent education. We are very grateful to you for this.
Mask requirements for students during the exams (starting on Saturday, 26 June)
Students are still required to wear a mask when moving around inside buildings, when waiting to enter an exam room and whenever they cannot maintain social distancing. They may remove their mask once they have taken their seat.
Teaching this fall
Looking ahead, news about the pandemic has improved, and the Federal Council has just announced that most restrictions will end on 26 June. We can thus plan for things to return to normal for the fall semester, with everyone back on campus. If the situation worsens, we will of course be required to reinstate the measures we’ve been living with for the past few months, but we’re optimistic.
Classes should be able to be held again on campus. That said, we have seen some of the advantages of online teaching. Various online tools have increased the number of questions that students ask, and video recordings of classes have turned into a popular learning resource. On that latter point, a meta-study published in February in the Review of Educational Research, which looked at around 100 empirical studies, revealed substantial learning benefits (0.8 standard deviation) from adding video to existing teaching. If you wish to learn more, EPFL’s LEARN Center will hold a Lunch & Learn on Monday, 28 June, to discuss the study’s findings and the use of video in higher education.
Given these benefits, we strongly encourage you to continue video recording your classes. We know this requires an additional effort, so we will make things as easy as we can by supplying you with the resources you need to produce high-quality videos. We will also provide you with guidelines this summer. There is no point in recording every class session, but at least whenever you change the content, so that the available recording always corresponds with the course that the students took during the ongoing semester.
Thank you for taking the time to read this message. We wish you an enjoyable and relaxing summer, and we look forward to bringing our campus back to life with you in September.
And please keep taking good care of yourselves!
Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg, Associate Vice President for Education
Prof. Kathryn Hess Bellwald, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Outreach