It's a complicated business....

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Two recent articles have prompted a flurry of commentary on social media around the quality of learning in higher education.

The first, from the Times Higher Education Supplement was entitled 'Academics fail to change teaching due to fear of looking stupid'. A year long study found that younger academics held on to strong ideas about what they considered to be 'good pedagogy', often because they had inherited these ideas from their own professors while studying at university. Generally, this was the traditional didactic method of standing up and delivering content. Other methods, including interactive, collaborative and student centred approaches to teaching were shunned, because to adopt them would expose the younger academics to potential ridicule or loss of face. It takes a strong and courageous academic to swim against the tide in many academic communities (see positive deviants).

The second article from the BBC, suggests that the UK government is about to implement plans to grade all university courses into three categories - Gold, Silver and Bronze. The implications of this are that universities will need to work that much harder to market their programmes to future students. Does this mean that teaching standards will need to improve? Does it mean that new approaches to teaching will need to be adopted by academics to attract a savvy generation of new undergraduates to their courses? If it does, this should be a welcome move. However, if the decision means that lecturers are put under even greater pressure than they are currently under, then we should expect an even greater exodus of good staff from universities than we are currently witnessing.

It's a complicated business, higher education....


It's a complicated business.... by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.