Last week a Deakin U dean told staff to “keep calm and carry on”. A lot of work will now be on-line

 On Saturday afternoon Vice Chancellor Iain Martin emailed staff and students advising;

“Over the next week, we will progressively transition from in-person student attendance at large classes in lecture format, to on-line forms of delivery in our Cloud Campus. You will receive further information about this initiative in the next week.”

Professor Martin assured the D U community, “I must reiterate that our campuses are open, and the university continues to operate as usual.”  But, taking large lectures entirely on-line is an escalation from the position on Friday afternoon, when he advised, “large events and functions” were cancelled in-line with the government ban on assemblies of 500 people but otherwise the “core-operations” of the university were not impacted.

And it was sky-high above the message from Deakin U dean of science and engineering Karen Hapgood who urged the faculty, “to keep calm and carry on” during the week. We all need to continue to come to work and support our students and colleagues and maintain as much business as usual as possible,” she said.

The move of lectures to the cloud makes sense to observers of Deakin U; “The university promotes itself as the premiere ‘digital cloud university’ has invested many millions in the platform and loves to sing our praises about how capable we are,” one tells CMM.