Otago Disabled Students' Association co-presidents Rose Abdul Aziz and Sean Prenter said some members of the disabled community who were immunocompromised were likely to be feeling additional anxiety at this time.
Ms Abdul Aziz said the onus on the group was higher because they were dealing with many immunocompromised people.
The association had decided to organise only online gatherings for the moment to ensure the safety of all in the group, she said.
On their social media platforms they were encouraging people to wear masks, practise social distancing and get their vaccine boosters.
Mr Prenter said the association was pleased with the University of Otago’s decision that lectures would be online for semester one, but wanted the university to go further and make it standard that all lectures were available to be viewed online as well as being accessible as recorded lectures.
At present it was up to individual lecturers to decided if recordings would be available, he said.
A University of Otago spokesperson said the decision to record lectures was up to the individual lecturer, based on the teaching requirements of the paper.
It was important to note that "recording a lecture" was not the only means of online learning and, for some papers, may not be the best method to conduct online teaching.
Where lecture recordings were being used, lecturers could choose how to make these available.
However, rather than simply providing online lectures or recorded lectures, some lecturers have chosen to use a wider range of online teaching tools available to them.
As such, some lecturers used face-to-face live sessions via Zoom or Teams, while others used asynchronous methods such as online discussion forums and other functionality within the university’s learning management system, and others use a combination of these and the other available tools.
The majority of pooled teaching facilities were equipped with Otago Capture, a lecture recording system that could record the audio and screen of lectures, as well as live-streaming.
