The University has made the decision to suspend face to face contact in the light of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak, and that of course impacts on many of the things that the WDC normally do to support your learning! We’ve suspended our face to face tutorials, workshops, writers’ groups and drop-ins, but we’re busily exploring other ways in which we can continue to offer advice and guidance as you study in these unusual times.

Firstly, we’re prioritising moving our one to one provision online. If you already have a tutorial booked with us, we’ll be contacting you soon to let you know how it’s going to work. If you’d like to book a one to one with us over the coming weeks, then we will be amending the booking process and information ASAP this week so you can get yourself an online appointment. As far as our tutorials go, we’ll try and keep it business as usual as much as possible! We’ve offered distance tutorials in the past for students who are off campus, so we have arrangements in place that can be scaled up.

We will be using Zoom for our tutorials, which we think is intuitive and user friendly, and will give you an experience which is as close as we can get to one of our friendly, interactive face-to-face tutorials. Zoom allows us to discuss your learning with audio and video, and share screens so you can show us any written work to look at together (for this reason, it will work best on a desktop or laptop with a bigger screen rather than a tablet or phone). Your tutor will send you a link before your appointment which you simply need to click on and join the meeting at the start of your appointment time.

We’re also thinking as creatively as we can about how else we can support you in the coming weeks. Moving all teaching and assessment online is going to be a bit different for all of us, and we’ll be there with lots of ideas to help you navigate it all and stay motivated. Stay posted here on our blog and our website for more updates!