Mary Beard’s post on the potential loss of palaeography posts at King’s College London added a new dimension to my consideration of current doom and gloom about Government funding for Higher Education. Like most people working in a university, I am currently re-examining current services, modelling how hypothetical cuts might be approached, how services might be sustained, and how new activity can be justified at the expense of something else.
The report that palaeography posts at KCL might be cut felt different in some way because this felt personal. As an archive student at UCL in the 1990s, I struggled through modern palaeography and bits of medieval palaeography, trying to distinguish the difference between a mark indicating a contraction, and a mark indicating that I was working from a twentieth generation photocopy of a photocopy. Despite this, it was one of the few ‘learning outcomes’ of the programme that I treasured – it felt like a ‘proper’ academic skill, and was one of the few skills that I actually used in my subsequent career (for the HE utilitarians, how’s that for a transferable employability skill?). Happy memories, and sad days to come.
….I’ve just written a NIMBY post haven’t I? Oh well, no one said a rant had to be logical.
the Government will not support Higher Education as an end in itself, but expects funding to be tied to delivery of public policy objectives
student/user-designed higher education supported by open source content and accreditation of DIY learning may develop, but will not in itself offer the other elements of HE experience, e.g. interaction with peers, academic scholars etc
employer-led provision – the idea of education as a preparation for professional employment is strong, but employers themselves tend not to see themselves as co-providers or leaders but as customers of output
In essence, Government, students and employers are looking for different things, and universities are not seen as the only option. Universities ‘must be willing to discard the anachronistic shibboleths that constrain innovation and modernisation’.
Some interesting examples of what Boxall calls ‘creative iconoclasm’ are highlighted:
‘learning hotels’ where a group of academics and practitioners across disciplines are invited to come together as a group within a university to tackle a particular problem
‘on-demand’ learning models giving students to design their own learning pathways
the growth of private sector specialist providers who might be brought into new types of public-private partnerships
Boxall ends by saying that no one route will define the future. The key thing will be to let go of outmoded assumptions.
I’m not conscious of learning anything fundamentally new here, but I did find it helpful to have such a neatly encapsulated and clear summary in the space of a couple of pages.
Long time, no blog. Another year, another Institutional Audit, this time combined with a dose of (suspected) swine flu. I don’t recommend mixing the two. The side effects of the drugs are unpleasant…and the Tamiflu isn’t great either…
While I have been dealing with audit symptoms and flu processes, HEFCE has published its consultation document on the process to be used when this cycle of audit comes to an end: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_47/
But what caught my eye, or rather my ear, this morning was the Today programme interview with Professor David Metcalf, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee:
0712 The government’s chief immigration adviser has called for a review of “lower tier” colleges over fears that too many foreign students are being given visas at the end of their degree courses. Professor David Metcalf said he was “stunned” to discover hundreds of colleges which were not “proper” universities could grant two-year work and residence visas to non-EU students. Professor Metcalf discusses visa system.
In the course of the interview, Professor Metcalf indicated that he had ‘raised an eyebrow’ about the quality of some of the institutions and programmes listed under the visa system. This struck me as a peculiarly British approach to quality management that could be submitted to HEFCE as part of its consultation. Forget the verdicts required by the current process on ‘confidence’/'limited confidence’ and ‘no confidence’ in the quality and standards of higher education institutions – let’s look forward to a regime under which audit teams might ‘raise an eyebrow’ at an institution, possibly going so far (in extreme cases only) as to ‘tut audibly’.
Forgive the flippancy – serious stuff, requiring serious consideration…just not from me, not this week.
Workshop on changing quality management structures and systems
A discussion of drivers for change:
streamlining – shortening processes while being more effective
saving money
asking is it necessary? What are the essentials? Looking at fitness for purpose in the context of a changing sector, e.g. new models of provision, such as CPD, employer-led provision, transnational education and collaborative provision, lead us to question the traditional ways in which we do things
changes in emphasis in the sector, e.g. increased emphasis on student involvement in quality processes
evolution of purpose – periodically re-examining accretions over time
Discussion centred around some of the tensions expressed in the current debate around Higher Education standards:
Complacency: the evidence presented by vice-chancellors before the IIUS select committee gave the impression of complacency because the arguments about the excellencein the sector were not perceived as compelling. Some participants asked if defence of the sector was difficult because the sector persisted in upholding a flawed defence based upon a presumption of…
Comparability of standards: As a sector we adhere to the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ), the foundation of which is the comparability of standards between institutions. This is the ‘Is a degree from Oxford worth the same as a degree from Oxford Brookes’ question. Some participants saw this assumption of comparability as damaging to the sector and saw the way forward as being a recognition that institutions and disciplines are different
Co-operation: There was general agreement among participants that a common public message was needed from the sector to defend the sector from further state intervention and to reassure the public
Competition: Finding a common message for the sector was acknowledged to be difficult when institutions are essentially in competitition with each other
Communication: the sector needs to articulate what ‘graduateness’ is, and to provide better information to prospective students and stakeholders on the variety on offer within the sector in order to enable informed choice (There is an irony here – in other sectors, such as health, choice is seen as a vitue, but in HE, that variety is seen to be a weakness to be threatened with additional regulation)
The author, Bruce Krajeski, presents this article in the current edition of the Times Higher as as appendix to Cornford’s 1908 Microcosmographia Academicaon being an academic politician.
As Cornford is one of my favourite satires on University life, I read on eagerly. I was disappointed.
Okay, it could be claimed that as an academic administrator myself, I might be sensitive on the subject – am I an adminizombie or a adminimessiah??? Don’t bother to answer that…
Is the microcosmos of administration due a satire or two? Definitely. But for me the article lacks the lightness of touch that characterises Cornford. How can you better this? Compare and contrast with Krajelski’s contribution:
take ‘farewell’ as a hortative staement about saying goodbye to this microcosm in favour of a counter-movement suggested by Kojin Karatani at the conclusion of Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
Huh? Perhaps this is a deliberately impenetrable retreat into jargon, given that one of the author’s arguments centres on the ‘tautologies and distortions of language that take place in the administrative microcosmos’. Clearly, I’m simply too much of an administrator to get the joke.
The article is illustrated with pictures of Byzantine sultans. That’s just lazy picture editing. If you’re claiming that the ways of administration are Byzantine then go for it, but don’t take as your starting point an Edwardian classic based on life in Cambridge and then just throw in a sultan or two for good measure because the word Byzantine occurs in the text. The word cupcake appears in the text on a similar number of occasions, but I don’t see pictures of iced cakey-goodness. See? Just plain disappointing.
This was a discussion around the mechanisms and culture of student engagement with a particular focus upon how we reach students who are not 18-24 yr old undergraduates. As a group, we realised that we knew very little about the expectations of those students, the ways in which they might wish to engage, or the limits they wished to place on their own engagement.
Certain types of engagement might be there (e.g. part-time students attending block teaching intensives who give very rich feedback on module evaluations but who do not engage with student liaison committees) but we are not recognising it. We recognised that we were trying to fit very different student constituencies into a single student engagement model and then becoming concerned when these models don’t reach certain types of groups. There is some learning to be done here about the flexibility of institutional models for student engagement and how far these take into account the diversity of the student body.
The challenge is not just for the institution alone but also for the student body – Students’ Unions are not typically good at representing the diversity of their own student constituencies.
This flags an underlying challenge on a broader scale: in a higher education system which has typically defined ‘graduate-ness’ and the student experience as residential, youth-centred and broader than the degree itself – what is the shape and content of the ‘student offer’ to a part-time student, a distance learner, a cpd student?
Student engagement also challenges our notions of the shape and content of quality management. To a student the student experience is a single whole containing aspects that we pigeonhole as academic, academic related and non-academic (put simply, lectures, libraries and car parks!) . The feedback we get from students covers this continuum and factors in one area can affect satisfaction or engagement in another. One potential question in quality management therefore may be about why and how we maintain boundaries between different quality mechanisms for academic provision and for non-academic services.
A few snippets of practice from elsewhere in the sector:
A Students’ Union planning to bring an annual equivalent of the (Audit) Students Written Submission forward for response by its institution
Use of regular open meetings for students with senior managers including the Vice-Chancellor
An audit of the types and quality of student participation through all different methods and channels in an institution in order to map what occurs where and what is effective
Division of agendas for Student Experience Committees into academic and non-academic items, with precedence given to non-academic items
Rotating committee meetings around various campuses and times to enable a range of students to join in
Okay, so the transcription of my notes from this meeting is a little less than swift, but I recalled some of the points made in the session about ‘The future of the student learning experience’ in light of the recent publication of the Select Committee report on students and universities, and the publication of this year’s NSS results.
I have to say that the half day meeting was something of a disappointment – if this was about the accountability of the Academy to its subscribers, it did not deliver; and if the purpose was to debate the implications for institutions of the future of the student learning experience, then presentations on national enquiries into HE (of varying length and quality) did not bring the focus down to the necessary level. However, I did take away the following points:
the contention from Paul Ramsden, Chief Executive of the Academy, that standards are best guaranteed by autonomy, and that an instrumental approach to education was not incompatible with a life-changing experience, but that there was a need to be able to communicate this and look at how the impact of the work of HEIs is measured. There was an unanswered question connected with this about how far the Academy has a role in speaking up on behalf of the HE sector;
from Merfyn Jones of Bangor University, a challenge: how to demonstrate accountability for investment of public funding, while retaining autonomy; how to incorporate skills while retaining the concept of education; and how to balance the tension of workplace planning and economic contribution with students’ choices about their personal development;
from Bernard King of the University of Abertay on the work of the Future Thinking Task Group in Scotland, the outcomes of which are to re-affirm the indivisibility of teaching and research, the expectation that HE will drive the economy, and a concept of ‘graduateness’ that is not just about a qualification. This connects with a re-conceptualisation of the role of the university in developing ‘graduateness’ and the indivisibility of teaching and research;
prescient comments from Aaron Porter of the NUS who predicted that student satisfaction as measured in the NSS would decline this year in light of the twin factors of the first cohort of students who had paid top-up fees, graduating in an environment where employability did not offer the type of benefits they might have expected from their ‘investment’. He argued that institutions should be supporting students to articulate more effectively the full range of skills and benefits (not just money or jobs) they derived from their learning experience.
Students took turns as “directors for a day”, gaining classroom experience by emulating the professor. They were expected to deliver original presentations based on novel research rather than parrot the shopworn arguments of their predecessors. Often they picked their own topics instead of having them assigned by the professor. Peer pressure and competition for professorial approval induced them to take on the most difficult research problems and tackle them assiduously.
Nor did we find any interest in testing the assumptions that pervade the sector—for example, that there is a link between carrying out research and the quality of teaching.
I’m in the final stages of preparing for joint delivery of a workshop for an EU Tempus project looking at how a quality unit relates to the institution and how quality management works in practice.
The two key points we are trying to convey are about ensuring that the approach to quality fits the academic culture, and about how to engage the academic community in quality management so that it is owned rather than imposed.
Rather dry subject matter, I admit. thankfully I was rescued by a far more imaginative colleague who put me on the track of a musical analogy. As a result (and technology permitting) I hope to illustrate the point with the contrast in between a marching band and a jazz ensemble.
In some organisations it may be possible to get everyone marching in the same direction, at the same time and to the same tune.
In my experience of academia and of quality management, you’re doing pretty well to get to the level of the jazz band, where individuals function more loosely as an ensemble, riffing and improvising around the same tune.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408553&c=2