Delay sending out textbooks caused by printer being closed due to COVID-19, says law school, which has moved all materials online
A lack of hard copy course materials is starting to bother some BPP University Law School students, exposing the limits of doing everything online.
Students who started at the law school this month on its accelerated Legal Practice Course (LPC) are yet to receive physical copies of “permitted materials”, i.e. textbooks that can be taken into exams such as Butterworths Company Law Handbook, and other hard copy materials.
BPP has said in a statement that all LPC materials are accessible to students online via its Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
In addition, it is now starting to provide hard copies of the permitted materials, which are being printed and posted directly to students. The law school is trying to get these out to students “as quickly as possible” but its external printing partner only re-opened with limited printing capacity last week following closure and staff furlough amid the coronavirus lockdown.
Some students, however, continue to be disgruntled by the lack of provision of other hard copy materials, such as chapter notes and other handbooks, which a source tells us were provided to previous LPC cohorts. They said:
“A lot of students are resorting to printing sections of chapter notes and handbooks because BPP has so far refused to provide these in physical form, which all previous cohorts received.”
A student added that workbooks, for example, need to be in a physical rather than PDF format because students often have to work out calculations which they say isn’t as easy to do online. “Workbooks like wills and administration of estates and taxation need to be in physical form — everyone knows that,” they commented.
BPP has issued this statement: “BPP is fully committed to supporting our students, and to this end the whole team has put in enormous efforts to ensure that learning, teaching and assessment can continue, despite the difficulties that COVID-19 has brought.”
It continued:
“We can confirm that all LPC materials are available to students on the VLE, and in addition are providing hard copy permitted materials which are being printed and posted directly to our students. These hard copy permitted materials are being provided to students as quickly as possible but our printing partner only re-opened with limited printing capacity last week. In the meantime, students have access to all their materials on the VLE.”