Easter School Online

It was better than nothing but it wasn’t ideal…

Our well organised, carefully planned, and eagerly awaited Easter School was going to be 6 days of seminars, fine lunches and fun. We were even bringing in a well-known and experienced speaker from London to finish it off on the last day.

Of course, that all went up in smoke when the lockdown happened. What to do?

We did what we could. Those tutors who could run lessons on Zoom, Whereby or Skype went ahead and did it. I even managed to teach Pharmacy 1 and 2 from my husband’s office [he has superfast fibre broadband and I don’t]. Herbal Therapeutics was easier for me in that I didn’t have so many props to ferry across the garden from my clinic to his office. For Herbal Therapeutics I ran a presentation and we had group discussions after each symptoms pattern and therapy strategy – it was nice to see everyone’s faces on the gallery setting in Zoom, and catch up with how they were doing.

There were some lessons that couldn’t be shared effectively online – like practical clinical skills where students have hands-on sessions being shown how to perform physical examinations. And there were some tutors who did not have internet capabilities, or were not able to travel to a site where they could access such capabilities.

What shall we do in May? That depends, but we will sort it. For a school that prides ourselves on face-to-face tuition it is not going to be easy – but we will find a way through and get back on track as soon as we can. There are obviously more important things to consider going on in our country than whether we run our lessons or not.