The government of Austria has decided to suspend all in-person university lectures and seminars until early April, in a bid to halt the spread of the coronavirus. The country’s roughly 380,000 students will have to rely on distance learning, with lectures and teaching material being provided online for the time being.
“Reorganising could take a little time,” explained Education Minister Heinz Faßmann of the Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party – ÖVP), announcing the shutdown in Vienna. The ruling ÖVP-Green coalition is however confident that all universities will stick to their commitment to carry on with teaching via distance learning by 16 March at the latest.
Regular teaching will not be resumed before the beginning of April. Faßmann is wanting to ensure that the shutdown will not delay studies in the long run. Nevertheless, the University of Vienna, the country’s largest institution, has warned that mail servers and websites could become overloaded under the strain of the emergency measures. Furthermore, major university libraries are being closed. Teacher training students are now banned from teaching at schools.
Research activity continues
However, research activities are to continue. “There’s little point in shutting down the universities altogether,” Faßmann noted in Vienna.
Commenting on why schools themselves had not been included in the shutdown measure, federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) maintained that young people between the ages of 14 and 30 were the chief carriers of the disease, and that suspending lectures in university halls meant less physical interaction between individuals and a lowering of the risk of the disease spreading.
Kurz stressed that this also concerned contact between Austrian and international students. And he explicitly referred to universities in Tyrol, but also in other parts of the country, hosting large numbers of students from Italy, particularly from neighbouring South Tyrol. Italy is the country worst hit by the coronavirus epidemic in Europe.
“We have to find ways to keep the system going and avoid students having disadvantages in their studies,” said Sabine Seidler, president of uniko or Universities Austria, Austria’s conference of university heads.
Authority regulations rule out any major exams at the moment. However, Seidler suggested that some tests could be run on a smaller scale, with students keeping at a safe distance from one another. She noted that institutions were making progress with switching to temporary online teaching and were set to take up regular activities again after Easter.