Internationalisation - compete or collaborate?
Prof Drummond Bone recent report on changes in the market for international students, International issues in Higher Education, predicts that the current market model UK HEIs operate with is unsustainable and we will have increasing difficulty attracting international students to study here. The report identifies two main reasons for this. Firstly, Universities in the less developed countries that currently provide us with a large proportion of our overseas student are modernising fast and are becoming more attractive to their home students and employers. Secondly, non-english speaking countries are beginning to put on programmes and schemes taught entirely in English including Germany, Sweden, even France! And these will start competing for our home students. There are is an interesting article and leader on this in the THES today: The language of competition by Matthew Reisz and Everyone is talking the talk, a leader by Ann Mroz.
The DIUS report is is worth looking at for its recommendations on how we should approach the recruitment of international students in the future - teaching and supervising in partnership with overseas institutions and internationalising our curriculum and programmes to make them more relevant to overseas and our home students.
Part-time students and part-time study
Having read Part-time Study in Higher Education by Prof. Christine King it seems that most students, enrolled as full-time or part-time, are actually engaged in part-time study to some degree or other. The distinction between full-time and part-time study, in practice, is breaking down. FT students are increasingly working part-time to fund their studies (66% in term time, 82% in vacations) compared with 83% of PT students who work. A key difference is that FT students fit work around their study and PT students fit study around their work. And of course PT students do not get their fees paid up front.
The report makes it clear that more flexible organisation and curricula would benefit full-time students as well as part-time students. Perhaps HEIs that do not see part-time students as a key area for growth over the next 10 years or so may well find they are in a position to do so anyway on the back of developments aimed to improve provision for their full-time students. As the report says, quoting UniversitiesUK, ‘the high level of flexibility and personalisation in part-time study mode provides a template for the future of the learning experience in higher education’. The report also identifies the need for a flexible HE workforce to support diverse patterns of student needs and expectations, enhance staff scholarship (perhaps to produce open learning content and to develop the skills required to facilitate the use of OLC and blended learning techniques?), and practice based learning. This may provide a variety of different employment possibilities for PGs and even ‘retired’ staff. I hope so!
It also looks like the part-time route to a degree is becoming increasingly attractive to school leavers. 10% of PT students are under 21 and this proportion is growing. If PT students had the same funding model as FT this would expand dramatically I suspect, in which case HEIs that have mainly full-time students may well get far more applications to study part-time and may find they are in a good position to accommodate these due to initiatives already in place to offer flexible, blended and personalised learning.
The development of a flexible curriculum could also benefit strategies designed to respond to other significant opportunities and threats for UK HE, for instance internationalisation, recruiting overseas students and constructing partnerships with other universities. It seems that flexibility in organisation, curriculum and teaching will be the answer to all our problems!
Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning
The Teaching and Learning Research Programme TLRP has just published its commentary on education and Web 2.0 technologies Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning.
Despite valuable early contributions to the web 2.0, much of the discussion within the education community has been speculative. This Commentary sets out to challenge the confident portrayal of web 2.0 by many educationalists in terms of an imminent transformation of learning and teaching. Careful thought has therefore been given to how technologists, educators and learners can best shape the fast-changing internet in the near future. It aims to explore how education can change the web, as well as how the web can change education.
“Web 2.0 is a reality. Education 2.0 is an aspiration. I hope this Commentary will play its part in transforming the web into a technology that can shape a radically new vision of teaching and learning in the 21st century” Richard Noss, Director, TLRP-TEL. London Knowledge Lab. University of London.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but the content page looks interesting!
What are web 2.0 technologies and why do they matter?
Educational hopes and fears for web 2.0
Learning and virtual worlds
Learning and social networking
Web 2.0 - future issues and technologies
Education 2.0?
Responding to diverse groups of learners
Reading the Universities UK paper on demographic changes helped clarify for me the choices available to Russell Group universities to the threats and challenges it identifies. One of the possible consequences of the increasing diversity of student groups and needs - adult work-based, returning learners, part-time, individual life long learners, employer funded and so on - is that the expanding HE sector and its public could become even more confused than it is already about what HE is and what it is for. The diversity of student groups and their needs and expectations will provide numerous opportunities for existing HEIs and for other bodies and institutions, existing or newly created in response to demand. Existing HEIs will need to be clear what is distinctive about their provision and what student sectors they are best fitted to serve. As the report says, higher education delivered by a university (emphasis in the report) “offers a unique opportunity to learn in an environment informed by current research”. What many HEIs offer students is the opportunity to join and be partners in a research and scholarship led community of learners. The excellence of their research and the way this informs the curriculum and the learning/teaching processes, resources and facilities is the key differentiator with respect to other and emerging providers of, in its increasingly indeterminate conception, higher education. Direct engagement with the secondary and FE sectors and with employers will be beneficial to all concerned but HEIs should maintain a clear distinction and concentrate on their core missions of research and knowledge creation coupled to a commitment to preparing graduates for a career and life and not, in the words of the report, “a single job”. It may be that the best way forward for many HEIs is to concentrate without compromise on their current student constituencies, UG and PG, and the excellence of their provision for them but at the same time develop the curriculum, learning materials, resources and learning and teaching processes and support so that they can be packaged and made available more flexibly to part-time and non-traditional students via mixed delivery modes. This could be achieved over a period of years in a way that allows for the required development of systems and staff. This would fall a long way short of providing an extensive distance learning offering or becoming specialists in bespoke programmes, something other institutions and bodies may choose to become. However it would allow selective engagement with the growth areas in the student ‘market’ most aligned to fundamental core missions by developing and exploiting our traditional strengths in research, knowledge creation and the development of the graduate skills suited to work, well-being and citizenship for life in a fast changing knowledge based society.
Teaching and the Student Experience
A slightly more detailed summary of Paul Ramsden’s report, Teaching and the Student Experience, can be found on the wiki that supports this blog (http://sites.google.com/site/hefutures/teaching-and-the-student-experience). This post is my immediate response to a reading of the report. I found the report very interesting and useful. There seems, to me at least, to be some contradictions between the glowing account of the current state of teaching and student satisfaction in the UK HE sector, particularly in the early part of the report, and some of the more detailed accounts of particulars. For example, the mismatch between student expectation and what they experience on coming to university, the dissappointment with the quality of learning infrastructure, the growing fragmentation of the student experience, the perception and reality of the under-rewarding of teaching compared with research, the lack of a career structure for staff wishing to specialise in teaching and contributing to the student experience, the leadership of some Deans and Heads that is inimical to good teaching, and so on. An, admittedly selective, reading of the report could produce a pretty dire picture. My experience indicates the reality is half way between the overly optimistic and the excessively bleak accounts with some evidence that things are moving in the right direction.
The report’s characteristation of the student body and the various different types of student experience will be more or less applicable for different Universities. At Leeds it is not the case that 25% of our students are part-time. The majority of our students are 19 to 21 , studying full-time, attend classes, enjoy a social life dominated by their colleagues and are taught by a priviledge academic elite (in my opinion!). This is why the majority of them come to us in the first place. However, much else is true - they are plugged into social networks that extend beyond HE, many more of them are working whilst studying, and blended and flexible provision is becoming increasingly important to their success and experience. There are many aspects to the the future of HE and universities will need to buy into them carefully and selectively, particularly with respect to different student constituencies. Whether Leeds will succeed in maintaining its particular mix of students, or even want to, will unfold over the next 10 years or so.
I liked very much the notion of partnership between students and academic staff, the importance of not using e-learning as a substitute for face-to-face interaction and the preservation of ‘the intimacy of the pedagogical relationship’ - although I have found the latter to be achievable via social networking techniques in conjuction with F2F interaction. The general thrust towards engaged partnership rather than a simple service model is especially welcome but part of the problem, as implied by the report, is student expectation based upon the comfort zone that the familar service model offers. I think there is some mileage in thinking about engaged partnership along the lines of a broad apprenticeship model - as engagment as a member of a community of practice. Participation as a member of a community may well be part of the answer to countering the fragmentation that can occur from flexible participation around the edges of a disperate student body and the current tendency to encouraging the development of personal learning environments.
Finally, for this post, I was very pleased to see the clear connection being made between scholarship and the development of teaching and the delivery of learning. Very few departments could put together a coherent degree scheme based exclusively on their research strengths and staff. How then can a research led approach be applied to all modules and across whole programmes? There are several ways this can be done of course, especially if a distinction is made between research outcomes and research processes. Research outcomes will be specific, the research process is generic. Elsewhere I have made use of a distinction between ‘discovery’ research and ’scholarship’ research - I’m afraid I cannot remember where I first heard this. Discovery research is what tends to get funded, counts towards research assessement and is supported by sabbaticals. This is where promotions are gained, careers progressed, reputations made and Chairs won. Scholarship research is more generally seen as activity associated with curriculm development and plugging the gaps in the progammes, for instance level one broadly based introductory modules. Often level 2 and 3 modules are based on scholarship research when they need to be taught to meet subject benchmarking criteria but the topic is not covered by the department’s discovery research activity. Scholarship in this sense is low status and generally no provision is made to support it or reward it.
Scholarship is an essential practical bond between teaching and research […..] involving the reinterpretation of knowledge and the identification of superordinate themes. [….] Project fellowships and study leave to produce scholarship related to teaching will help to sustain a spirit of innovation in teaching and a high quality student experience. They will also help to redress the perceived imbalance between rewards for teaching and for research. (page 14)
Hear, hear!
Reactions to On-line Higher Education Learning
I haven’t yet put together a coherent reaction to this report, but others have. Some important points are recorded here. DIUS Review of HE - Online Innovation in Higher Education 18th November 2008, 02:28 pm by Sarah Bartlett. In this post Sarah feels “the nub of this report is the pressing need for what Cooke calls a “visionary thrust” to guide the education and research sectors to the technological framework they desperately need. This is the most important point in the report, I think […]. Sarah thinks this is a job best done by JISC. She then goes on to take issue with the idea of the proposed Centres of Expertise. In the report these will be clusters of universities. Sarah feels it would be more realistic and effective for there to be a number of ‘lighthouse’ institutions adopting key technologies and demonstrating the way forward for others, much in the way they already are. Sarah’s final point is about how the report does not engage in any critical discussion of current e-learning technology, particularly insitutional VLEs. She was taken aback by the ridicule heaped on their VLE by lecturers at a Russell Group university recently - I’d love to know which Uni and which VLE!! The report seems to put the burden of improving e-learning on academic staff encouraging them to impove their on-line teaching skills.
Another useful response has been posted on the OUseful.Info blog by Tony Hirst. Perhaps not surprisingly this focuses mainly on the report’s views and recommendation on open source learning resources. Tony agrees with the general notion that more high quality open learning content would be a good thing but “but just making more content available under an open license won’t necessarily mean that anyone will use this stuff… free content works when there’s an ecosystem around it capable of consuming that content, which means confusion about rights, personal attitudes towards reuse of third party material, and a way of delivering and consuming that material all need to be worked on (my emphasis). All I can say is ‘hear hear’. Tony also is ambivelent about National Centres of Excellence and feels that “networked communities” would be better to take on this role as “the good will out”. This post has much else to think about - whether HE is best seen as a business, the problematic relationship between the notion and reality of ‘networked learners’ and traditional teaching and assessement modes, as well as the notion that the development and reuse of open content could follow the research model of building on previous efforts.
Summary: On-Line Higher Education Learning
The focus of this project is the development of e-learning within a blended learning approach and on the student experience. To this end a starting point is a review of all the discussion reports listed on the About this project page and a summary of each that tries to identify the most relevant findings, ideas and concepts in terms of the project, and annotating them to identify key issues, questions that arise and further work that needs to be done. The first summary has been completed and a version of the On-line Higher Education Learning report has now been posted to the project wiki. This has reduced the original 32 page report to 6 pages and about 6000 words. The approach has been to copy and paraphrase relevent sections and sentences, highlighting key concepts and ideas and adding bracketed annotations for observations, queries and notes of what needs to be elaborated further. In the wiki the summary is actually an embedded Google doc. This is a ‘live’ link to the orignal document so subsequent updates are automatically passed to the embedded version in the wiki.
I would be grateful for any comments, questions or suggestions that colleagues here care to make. The full rationale for the project is gradually taking shape. It will ultimately be focussed on producing a strategy and plan for the development of blended learning in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds but of course needs to be developed within a consideration of the wider HE environment changes projected over the next 15 years or so. This to some extent will impact on the School in mediated form via the decisions, strategies and plans that Leeds University makes. This is why the project starts with an examination of the possible UK HE sector’s development over the next 15 years and how Leeds university may situate itself to maximise opportunities and play to its strengths and appropriate constituencies of students and stakeholders.
Setting up the blog wiki
The purpose of this project is to focus particularly on the development of blended and technology enhanced learning and the student experience. However, it is clear that these topics cannot be understood and policies cannot be designed without detailed reference to the other discussion topics - for instance part-time study, demographic changes, the developing new constituencies of HE clients, the impact of the development of research and research careers, and so on. There is clearly potential for conflicts and contradictions between different policy areas as well as synergies so these need to be clearly identified. The analysis of the different discussion reports will need to be detailed and systematic and to this end I have started a wiki, using the Google site application, to support the project. This will also enable me to construct quite lengthy and detailed summaries and synthesis sections on the wiki and link to them from shorter blog posts here, as I have done above in the reference to the potential for conflicts. The Google site is called HE Futures and there is a link to it in the links section in the sidebar.
The Future of Higher Education - the Leeds Case
Welcome to the JISC Involve blog I will be using to report and reflect upon my forthcoming sabbatical which will be spent on researching and developing a potential strategy for meeting the challenges and opportunities for higher education over the next two decades. Th eproject will focus how these may impact on the University of Leeds. In addition to blog posts a number of static pages will be used to outline major components of the project and details of its methodology. Broadly speaking the project will be based upon and organised round a World Class Commissioning framework and to this extent will also be an evaluation of the framework as applied to an educational policy context.