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I'm a first year degree student in a college affiliated with the OU. Can the teachers force me to write and maintain neat running notes, tell me how to sit (I keep my legs crossed), which seat to sit in or force us to participate during class?

Can they force us to attend classes (by yelling, talking to us condescendingly or even by threatening us)? Can they link running notes to semester internals? I'm new to this, and this all seems overly controlling to me.

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    I've made some changes to your questions. However, right now, there is a lack of focus (too many questions). Try to rephrase it to focus on the 'controlling' question and use the other questions as examples. Also, I don't know what the OU is and whether that is relevant, so please edit this into your question if this matters. I also don't know what running notes or semester internals are, and if/how they are relevant.
    – Jeroen
    Oct 29, 2021 at 7:24
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    "Can they force us to attend classes" depends on your individual situation. For example, international students in the UK are required by the government to have a certain number of contact hours per week, and institutions are meant to record and enforce this.
    – user1729
    Oct 29, 2021 at 8:51
  • Does the programme have any intended learning outcomes for which maintaining neat running notes might be a valid assessment? Might the telling-which-seat-to-sit-in have been a social distancing precaution against transmission of CoViD-19 (or some other prevalent airborne infection)?
    – Daniel Hatton
    Oct 29, 2021 at 11:31
  • @user1729 If this is the UK, then OU would normally be the Open University, which would have no contact time, being a remote institution. The reference to "colleges" makes me thing that OU might be Oxford university, where i would think that attendance at tutorials, if not lectures is definitely enforced (when i was at Cambridge, we had to pay for the tutors time if we missed a tutorial without a good excuse).
    – Ian Sudbery
    Oct 29, 2021 at 11:34
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    OU in this context very likely refers to Osmania University.
    – GoodDeeds
    Oct 29, 2021 at 11:44

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Can the teachers force me to write and maintain neat running notes Can they link running notes to semester internals

In general no, but if this is a course on how to study effectively, then part of the course is writing and maintaining neat running notes and that would have to be part of the grade.

tell me how to sit

In general no, unless what you are doing is disruptive. The difficulty is that what is disruptive is subjective.

which seat to sit in

Now with COVID we have to control who sits where, especially make sure that distance is maintained.

force us to participate during class

Active participation is part of the grade in many of my classes. So yeah, absolutely.

Can they force us to attend classes

Yes, the extend to which this can happen depends. In some institutions there are certain justifications necessary, e.g. to learn how to work in a lab you have to attend the lab... In other institutions every class can be compulsory. Most are somewhere in between.

by yelling, talking to us condescendingly or even by threatening us

That can be serious, and deserves a question in its own right. So I am not going to discuss this here as part of this long list.

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    I'm intrigued by an approach that explicitly says "issue X is more important than the other issues raised here, therefore I'm going to omit issue X from my discussion".
    – Daniel Hatton
    Oct 29, 2021 at 12:26
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    In the question it is at the end of the list and in parentheses, indicating it is not important to the OP. It is also very different from the other elements. Answering it together with the other elements does not do it justice.
    – Maarten Buis
    Oct 29, 2021 at 13:14

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