Texting the course

Here’s a phenomenon I hope doesn’t catch on: I recently talked in an airport departure lounge with a student (studying at another university) who told me that his entire knowledge for the forthcoming exams came from mobile phone texts that his girlfriend, who was apparently a more conscientious attender of classes, had sent him summarising the syllabus. He had attended no lectures or tutorials. He had read no books. He had her texts. I hope, really hope, that he was pulling my leg, but I fear he wasn’t. He had, it seemed, the ultimate ‘textbook’, and he was quite confident that he could pass. I never even got to asking him how he had handled essays and assignments, that question occurred to me too late.

But the extreme nature of this particular study technique perhaps illustrates a broader issue. The conventional textbook sold for an outrageous price by a small band of publishers is, one hopes, on the way out. The internet in particular is undermining their business model, and we’ll be none the worse for that. In one interesting development, an American community college now runs a course that uses only open source material, and the students therefore do not need to buy anything. The college calculates that this saves each student $2,000 per annum.

For many lecturers the textbook was a comforting prop, providing them with course materials that needed no assembling. For students, such books were often profoundly anti-intellectual, suggesting to them (even where that was not the authors’ intention) that there is a ‘correct’ answer to every question, even highly theoretical ones. However, it is important that what replaces them is not just smartly digital, but is also part of a genuine introduction to real scholarship. I suspect that the post-textbook course materials handed out or made available on online learning platforms such as Blackboard or Moodle are often unimaginative and as prescriptive as the old textbooks – though of course there are also many examples of genuinely good practice.

New technology has freed the universities and colleges from the clutches of publishing cartels. But that must lead to something more profound than a narrow range of online materials; or your girlfriend’s mobile phone texts.

Digital ephemera?

Although we now clearly live in a digital age, we are often still very hesitant about accepting its robustness. In fact, though I am an enthusiastic user of every digital device and all electronic media, even I can be uncertain about their durability. A couple of years ago I was asked by a group of schoolchildren to advise them what format to use for electronic data they wanted to put in a time capsule, to be opened in 100 years. Paper, I said without hesitation. I could not be sure that a disk, or a memory stick, or a DVD would still be readable in 100 years time, or indeed that they would not have degraded in the interim.

So what does that mean? Should we assume that what we consume in digital format is for the moment only? This question has been raised on some occasions in relation to ebooks: is reading literature (or anything else) in this format the same as reading a paper-based book, or is it in some way different? The author Jonathan Franzen has recently suggested that the ‘impermanence’ of ebooks makes them unsuitable for serious reading. This becomes an issue in universities when the prospect arises of distributing course materials entirely in digital format, so-called ‘etexts’. Some argue in favour of using these, others are more cautious; but the early evidence is that they can be very effective educational tools.

Personally, I am willing to read pretty much anything in ebook format, though if I believe that I will want to read the book again and may want to reference it in future, I’ll buy a paper copy. But textbooks are different anyway. Most students dispose of them after they have completed their studies. There is therefore little reason to conclude that having etexts is somehow worse than having traditional books; indeed the use of etexts may provide lecturers with an opportunity to use innovative pedagogy.

I still do not know how the digital world will develop, and I am absolutely ready to believe that what we use now in electronic format will not be useable in 30 years time. But I do believe that the principle of electronic reading will continue to be adopted, and the technology will eventually produce more durable products; and I see no evidence of any pedagogical disadvantage. We must continue to innovate, even if the books on my bookshelves will remain also.

The progression of learning

Some weeks ago I was attending a workshop on secondary education, in the course of which I expressed my concerns that the learning methods encouraged and used in order to prepare students for final school examinations (‘A’ Levels, Leaving Certificate, Highers) were wholly at odds with the higher education approach to scholarship: that schools were teaching students to behave in ways that were pedagogically suspect and would harm them when at university. One of my complaints was that students were encouraged to adopt rote learning methods.

In the course of the same workshop during an open discussion session it became necessary, for reasons I won’t bother you with here, to multiply 7 by 9. As various hands reached for calculators or calculator apps on mobile phones, I expressed astonishment that everyone could not just say immediately from memory that the answer was 63. ‘Ah’, said one bright spark, ‘but you just told us that rote learning was bad.’ Well, I replied, I never suggested that it was unnecessary for people to learn and memorise certain key facts; it is just that as education progresses you need to move from basic knowledge accumulation to analysis and intellectual creativity. But if you know nothing, you won’t be much good at analysing anything. Now what we appear to have far too often is that the basic building blocks of knowledge are not implanted in young minds, while later in the education cycle far more arguable propositions are presented as ‘facts’ to be memorised for subsequent regurgitation in exams. And that is the wrong way round.

Far too often now I come across people educated in the period, say, between 1975 and 2000 who know very little or even nothing of what I would regard as elementary aspects of history, geography, mathematics or science; or whose knowledge of language is amazingly insecure. Often these people leave higher education and enter employment, where their employers then blame universities (mostly unfairly) for failing to educate them satisfactorily.

All of this has become a matter of discussion and dispute in the wider educational debate. In England the Schools Minister has recently suggested that there should be some return to rote learning to ensure that students acquire and retain basic mathematical skills in particular. In other contexts I am not, as I have expressed here before, a fan of the English government’s education policy, but here the Minister may be right. He has been criticised by the National Union of Teachers, but he should stand firm. It is time to re-establish a much better understanding of pedagogy and learning.

Good teaching is about passion

When I was a law student in the 1970s, we had one lecturer whose teaching was simply appalling. He sat while lecturing (with no physical reasons for doing so). He never looked at the class. He never asked questions, rhetorical or otherwise. He never encouraged analysis. His delivery was monotonous. He never showed or used humour. He never varied the content of his lectures from year to year. In examining, he rewarded (and therefore got) the uncritical regurgitation of his own views. He was a kind of icon of pedagogical awfulness.

What made this particular lecturer so terrible was that he seemed to have no passion of any kind for his subject, or for the topics that he covered. His teaching, if it was that, was simply something that got him from the beginning to the end of the lecture, and from the beginning to the end of the academic year. It had no purpose other than that of filling an allotted slot in the syllabus. This kind of emotional disengagement is however contagious. A lecturer who shows no real interest or spirit stirs up similar apathy amongst their students. Despite that, some of them will base their careers on the topic in question, and will become another generation of the disengaged.

All subjects, if they are worth teaching, are worth getting excited about. When I was a PhD student in Cambridge, I occasionally amused myself by attending the lectures of a Botany lecturer who had this extraordinarily infectious enthusiasm for his subject. I knew nothing about the subject, but I loved the passion he showered on it.

There are many things that make a lecturer good. Charles L. Brewer, Professor of Psychology in Furman University, in a well known address in 2005 on the Joy of Teaching, stated that he had always ‘tried to teach with passion, preparation, parsimony, perseverance, and patience.’ I would suggest that the greatest of these is passion.

Student choice

When I was an undergraduate law student in Dublin in the 1970s, the content of my degree programme was largely fixed for me, but there were some choices. During my first two years studying law, all my subjects (there were no ‘modules’ then) were compulsory, in part of course reflecting the requirements and demands of the legal professions. During the third year, three subjects were compulsory, and students could choose a fourth from a menu of about seven options. In the fourth and final year one subject was compulsory, and the remaining three were chosen by the student from the same list of seven options. That was it.

In today’s higher education environment the basic structure of degree programmes has, in almost all universities, changed fundamentally with the arrival of modularisation. Students must still, in most institutions, opt for a degree programme in a menu made available to them, but within these programmes they can now expect to be able to make significant choices as to which specific elements (modules) they will take, and in a number of institutions these choices will include some ‘free electives’ that can be taken from outside the subject area they have chosen for their degree. So for example, University College Dublin (UCD) describes this part of the framework as follows:

‘In addition, you generally also have a choice of two ‘elective’ modules (subject to module entry requirements, timetable and availability of places), which can either be taken from within your main subject area to deepen your learning, or from outside it to broaden your learning. The choice is yours.’

Sometimes this level of discretion is not popular with academics, who fear that the selection of modules from outside the key discipline may create difficult complications. Modules made available in other programmes may not be easily understood outside of those programmes, and students taking them in this way may lack necessary background knowledge. There may also be budgetary difficulties as student numbers become hard to predict in individual modules.

Nevertheless, as we increasingly emphasise the significance of interdisciplinarity, modular flexibility may become  more desirable. But how far should it be a free choice, and to what extent should it be constrained or at least guided? The traditional understanding of higher education was heavily focused on education within and for disciplines. Is such intellectual compartmentalisation still possible? Do we have a new pedagogical understanding of the coherent formation of students?

Education, skills and training

When the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) reshuffled his cabinet recently, he re-named two government departments; one of these was the (former) Department of Education and Science (which has become the Department of Education and Skills). The ‘and Science’ part of the organisation migrated, at least by implication, to what was the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and is now Enterprise, Trade and Innovation.

Do these name changes matter? Here is how they were explained by the Taoiseach in his speech to Dail Éireann (parliament) announcing the reshuffle on March 23:

‘The changes I am making are intended to ensure that political leadership and administrative capacity are aligned with the core objectives of economic recovery, job creation and support for those who have lost their jobs. In particular, I am strengthening our approach to supporting innovation and overcoming barriers to structural change; responding better to the needs of unemployed people; supporting productivity and growth through skills development; maintaining progress in a coherent and strategic way towards important social policy goals, and accelerating the pace of modernisation of the public service.’

In the reshuffle itself, the two Ministers who ran the now re-named departments swapped jobs. And here is how the new Minister for Education and Skills, Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, explained the significance of the change as it affects her department to the annual conference of the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI):

‘There has been a somewhat artificial divide between education and training in Ireland for many years and I know that the TUI has been vocal for some time now that a more joined up approach was needed. I am glad we have delivered that change. Your conference and the work many of your members are engaged in relates directly to my new task of bringing cohesion to this move of policy responsibility and service delivery. Together, we need to ensure the up-skilling and re-skilling of people across the country, a task that is central to how the State assists and supports those who have, unfortunately, lost their jobs during this recession.’

Taken together, it seems the name changes were designed to reflect the government’s priority concern with economic recovery and job creation. And in the case of the Department of Education specifically, the change is, as the Tánaiste explained, designed to blur the lines between ‘education’ and ‘training’.

But what does all this mean? Does it mean that all education is vocational? Is it all exclusively to do with preparing people for jobs? What, if any, are the pedagogical implications in all this?

It has been my contention for a while that education in Ireland has lost its way. There are a few reasons for this, but one of them is that nobody quite seems to know these days what education is actually for. This becomes more complex still when the agenda for what has become known as ‘lifelong learning’ is added to the mix – some of it has genuine pedagogical objectives, while some of it again seems to be primarily about removing people from the dole queue.

There is, I believe, quite a strong argument for placing both education and training in the same government department; but that argument is not that they are both the same. There should of course be a coherent view of learning that takes in both what goes on in schools, and what people do to develop themselves later in life. Furthermore, the education system should take account of national needs, so that students learn those things that are of benefit to society and to themselves. But that is not the whole story, and if we over-emphasise the vocational angle we will find young people balking at learning, say, Shakespeare or Yeats, or even Pythagoras, because they  will feel that these will not be of direct functional relevance to them in their lives as accountants or software programmers.

Education has to deliver some practical benefits to the country, but that is not the whole story. It is to be hoped that the new government structures will not suggest to anyone that all education is principally vocational training. It is time that, as a country, we rediscover the merits of pedagogy.

Changing higher education by stealth

Irish higher education has until now been based on a number of assumptions, some of which are quite old and venerable, while others are of more recent origin. The key assumptions are that there should be tuition that allows the student to develop independent thinking and that monitors his or her progress through individual encounters with tutors and through small group teaching; that consequently the student-staff ratio needs to be such that these methods can be effectively employed; that academic staff should have a balanced workload that usually involves both teaching and research, and that the latter should wherever possible inform the teaching; that the assessment of students should evaluate their success in engaging in a n intelligent critique of the subject; and that consequently this should involve continuous assessment as well as examinations.

If this is a fair characterisation of our higher education system, then it might be added that it is viable only if either student numbers are not too large, or with greater mass education resources are available to apply the above approaches to the larger population; and these resources allow for an increase in staffing that is, at least marginally, greater than the proportional rise of student numbers, as teaching gets more complex with greater participation. This is the case both because handling larger numbers and breaking them down into smaller groups is difficult logistically, and because with greater participation the levels of academic ability will be more mixed, requiring considerably more staff input.

In fact the opposite has happened, and with greater student numbers the unit of resource – i.e. the sum paid to universities per student – has fallen quite dramatically. This already serious issue has now been aggravated considerably with the recent more dramatic funding cuts, together with the reductions in staffing forced on the system by government decisions regarding the public service more generally.

The net effect of all of this is that we will have no option but to reconsider and progressively abandon the previous assumptions and methods. We can no longer hope to use small group teaching or individual tutor support. I do not believe that current resourcing models will allow continuous assessment methods to be used in future. And we are increasingly helpless in dealing with mixed ability issues in our classes. The result of this is that higher education is changing, but not through strategic decision-making but by stealth. The new methods, whatever they may be, are already likely to be questionable on pedagogical grounds; but in any case no such methods are being deliberately planned and evaluated. What we are witnessing is a random and chaotic movement leading to a decline in standards. We need to recognise this now, and address it before it is too late. Recovering lost quality is very hard to do. We must not get to that point.

All the decisions which have led us here have been driven by government, but have prompted no real response on a strategic scale. It is time for us to tackle these issues properly.

University: quiet reflection or sharp, focused study?

The British Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, is not perhaps the most popular man right now in academic circles. He is presiding over substantial funding cuts, and in addition seems intent on redefining what a university education is and how universities might best deliver it. He has come in for a fair amount of criticism, some of it no doubt understandable. But what he says in not necessarily out of step with the views now held in industry, politics and maybe even society at large. And because his remit covers the English higher education system (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are separate), it is worth looking at his views more closely.

Perhaps one of the most detailed statements of his approach to date was delivered yesterday in his speech at the Lord Dearing Memorial Conference at the University of Nottingham. At the heart of it was a suggestion that a time of fiscal retrenchment and budget cuts could and should be used to reconsider what society’s expectations are of higher education and what universities should do to meet them. One part of that message was around funding and income, with the suggestion (that I would agree with) that public funding is unlikely to satisfy higher education needs fully and that institutions must actively develop strategies for attracting other income; and that in doing so they must increasingly identify and prioritise their special strengths and differentiated missions.

But it is his other suggestion that I want to refer to here: that there needs to be ‘a greater focus on alternative modes of study’. He went on to explain this in more detail, arguing that ’part time degrees, shorter and  more intensive courses all offer the potential to lower student support costs, use resources more intensively and improve productivity.’ And here is how he explained why this is needed:

‘That is why, along side traditional three year full time degrees, I want to see part time study, two year Foundation Degrees and three years Honours courses delivered intensively over two years expand as part of the mix.  When their objectives and outcomes are clearly defined, and when they are taught well and properly resourced, there is no sense at all in which these alternatives should be seen as inferior to three year equivalents. And they can be, in many respects, better for students, especially for students without financial resources behind them. Because they enable them to earn and learn. They reduces the amount they have to borrow to get a qualification. And because these flexible kinds of education and training are vital for those who miss out on higher education straight after school the push for two year degrees and wider part time or work-based study should be at the core of the wider participation agenda. Those who argue against it risk painting themselves as defending an institutional inflexibility that doesn’t serve students, and doesn’t get the most out of public investment.’

There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the traditional university programme, delivered over an extended period of time, within an enclosed campus environment and requiring the student’s full-time attention (at least in theory) discourages or even excludes those from disadvantaged backgrounds or those who look for a second chance, later in life, to pursue a degree. Equally there are arguments to suggest that short degree programmes, or programmes focused deliberately on vocational links and outcomes will not adequately open the student’s mind to the intellectual underpinnings of higher education or give them the necessary time and motivation to reflect and adopt a critical perspective.

But then again, an intellectually driven education that can only really attract and retain a social elite may be attractive to that elite, but will otherwise almost certainly consolidate inequities and unequal opportunities.

So it all brings us back again to the dilemma on which all debate should really now be fixed: that the higher education framework that existed from the middle ages until recently has become untenable because it could not reach out to a broader population; but that we still tend to believe that its pedagogical approach was the most effective. We cannot go back to where we were, because society has moved on. But in the era of mass higher education we need to know better than we seem to know now what we want this much larger segment of society to get from their studies and what we therefore want our universities to do. We need to connect pedagogy with social policy, and we need to do that urgently. And we need to do that before we spend more time endlessly obsessing about higher education structures.

Customised education?

During my last two years at school (which dedicated readers of this blog will know were spent in Germany) I took what now seems to me to have been an amazing array of courses, including the usual core subjects but also including ones like philosophy, political science, constitutional law, international trade, physics, chemistry, biology, botany and theology. Looking back at my examination materials (some of which I still have – and I have to confess I didn’t take these yesterday), the standards in some of these were very high, not unlike what I would now expect from a first year university programme. Some of my German friends tell me that it’s all different now and that standards are much lower, but at any rate what I enjoyed was a significant educational experience.

When I then began to study law in Trinity College Dublin, I shared the course with those who had done the Leaving Certificate, and others who had done ‘A’ Levels. While the Leaving Certificate was also quite broad (though less so than the German Abitur), it amazed me to see how specialised ‘A’ Levels were, and how early therefore young people were required, in the UK, to make choices about the direction they wanted to pursue.

‘Customised’ education – where special choices can be made or perhaps have to be made – has become an increasingly normal feature of our times. The US Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that doubts were now being expressed about the extent to which Law degree programmes are being offered with a customised slant (Law with Marketing, Law with Clinical Psychology, and so forth), and suggested that ‘going to Law School to get a law degree has become a little like going to an ice-cream parlor for a scoop of vanilla’ with ‘elaborate flavor-and-topping menus’ [Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9 2009].

The question this poses is whether we want our higher education (and education generally) to focus on the things we want to be specialists in, or whether it should provide a broader grounding. More generally, there are major questions to be answered about the degree to which education provides skills or disseminates knowledge, or how both objectives can be combined in a manner that is both intellectually honest and functionally effective. Such questions are being asked and debated by educational specialists, but not in the academy at large; they are themselves specialist topics for those interested in pedagogy, rather than issues for all those involved in teaching and learning.

I suspect that the strategy processes we are about to embark upon will leave all this untouched - but they shouldn’t, and maybe they won’t.

Re-imagining university teaching

It is a frequently made comment that while the world around us has changed dramatically over the past 100 years, university teaching has not. You could, so some would say, enter a typical university classroom anywhere in the world and take away more or less the same pedagogical experience you would have had in 1908. I think we need to take such comments with a grain of salt: university classes are now conducted in facilities which, often, are quite different from their Edwardian counterparts, and we have access to (and use) technology that was not even dreamt of back then: bear in mind the ubiquitousness of Powerpoint, for example. And then again, think of all the modularisation and credit transfers and goodness knows what that have transformed the university curriculum.

And yet, there is some truth in the assertion. Behind the façade of innovation lurks a pedagogical dinosaur. The lecturer addressing a mixed-background class attending his module and backing up his or her key arguments with Powerpoint slides may be using new(-ish) technology and may be encountering different assessment methods, but the students will be faced with learning processes that are not that far removed from those of past eras.

I am not suggesting that what we are doing is bad, just that it’s not particularly new. And there is, I think, a curiosity in that: the last 20 years or so have seen an avalanche of new initiatives, new quality monitoring, new technology, new teaching methods, new assessment, new expectations by students; and yet, all this ‘new’ stuff has left only a very small footprint in the history of education, if really any at all. Much of the innovation has been driven by bureaucracy rather than pedagogy, and therefore, perhaps predictably, its intellectual impact has been minor.

But the ingredients are all there for a revolution: we have various pedagogical think tanks, including this significant one in Australia, or this one from Britain. And some individual universities have developed really innovative units to explore the possibility of teaching and learning reform, such as this institute in the University of Hull, or the Teaching and Learning Laboratory in MIT.

I suspect that one of the reasons why the impact of the work of educational researchers and innovators has been so limited is because the regulators seeking reform don’t know what they really want and are overloading the system with procedural requirements that actually inhibit, and occasionally even punish, real intellectual innovation. When that is put alongside the naturally conservative professional instincts of academics, we get nothing very radical in the classroom.

It is therefore time to scale down the procedural quality monitoring a little and to focus much more on learning enhancement and innovation. This requires an open mind on the part of both academics and their leaders and regulators. It is time for that debate to begin properly.