As a physicist, I’ve been trained to reach a conclusion, not on the basis of what I think, but where the evidence leads. What we are doing in relation to universities is the complete antithesis of that process. An assumption is being made (there is a problem, somewhere) and the chosen metrics are designed to reinforce that initial conclusion. The choice of ‘contact hours’ exactly fits the bill – oh look, such and such an academic is earning such and such amount BUT only does this number of hours of teaching … aren’t you outraged by that? Of course one could argue that since more first class degrees are being awarded, we’re exceeding previous preformance indicators (the number of students graduating with firsts) and therefore deserve a pay increase! No one likes that ‘metric’ because it doesn’t reinforce the preconception that something is wrong.

So I have exactly zero time for this sort of nonsense indicator. Fold ‘contact hours’ in with ‘hours spent on research’, ‘papers published’, ‘number of citations’, ‘research income’, ‘number of masters and doctorate students supervised’, ‘hours spent developing course material’, ‘hours spent on board meetings’, ‘hours involved in outreach activities’, ‘hours spent preparing for conferences’ etc and then, and only then, will I believe you have a performance indicator I recognise as being vaguely useful.

Lecture as content delivery or recital of facts is, IMNSHO, useless but I’ve come to the view that what is useful is “lecture” as storytelling, because people make sense of experience by folding it into narrative. This is where the lecture as recounting the research process works.

The problem is that we’re not all great storytellers, so we feel obliged to fill “24 x 1 hour lectures” with reciting facts.

My problem with Bologna is twofold – the guidelines of 100-150 hours of work for a 5 ECTs module is hideously above what the OECD figures for a working year would give, and the emphasis on Learning Outcomes which are often behaviorist and therefore weak in the affective domain, which Bloom never really finished in as much detail but which is clearly very important for constructivist learning.