Trust or Trussed?

Regulation in an economic system is often used to protect consumers where market failure cannot be remedied through encouraging competition. Profit is often the measure of market failure as less competition motivates suppliers to maximise their market advantage.

At the root of these motivations is a profit motive.

Regulation in Higher Education also aims to protect "consumers" but from what?

Do Universities have a profit motive? Do they abuse the position of trust that society has bequeathed them? Are academics out for what they can get? ( well, perhaps some are).

Regulation ties Universities up in knots, requires them to comply with ever more detailed rules and regulations, and actually deflects them from their key purpose to educate, inform and to create knowledge.

So do we trust our institutions or do we truss them like the Christmas turkey in red tape, law, regulation and rules?

Be a teacher - the holidays are brilliant!!

As we enter the festive season and contemplate a well earned Christmas break we need to recognise that the positioning of terms, academic years and vacations are a by-product of history, culture, climate and religion - almost nothing to do with education and learning.
But what would an academic year structure look like if we started from scratch?

• Would we start in September?  at least this would give a reasonable term of 11 - 12 weeks before the winter / summer (depending on hemisphere)
• Would we have such long holidays? Primary and Secondary School students can "forget" what has been taught but college and University students often need to work to afford higher education.
• Would we break again at Easter (a moving feast - literally - from the Christian tradition) - other religions seem to be able to manage study during Ramadan, Eid, Festivals and significant birthdays of prophets.

But in many countries the needs of parents, employers, the economy,  and, in Universities, those focused on research rather than teaching, will prevail and nothing will change.

Happy Christmas.

Teaching Grandfather

In 1986 The Insolvency Act heralded an era of professionalism in the insolvency industry by requiring all holders of insolvency offices to hold a license.  Such a license could be withdrawn (but few have been) for breaches of regulations and guidelines and following receipt and investigation of complaints by disgruntled creditors and others.
So, on 31 December 1986, when the Act came into force, there was a risk that there would be a shortage of  Insolvency Practitioners.
As Regulatory Bodies, such as the Insolvency Practitioners Association, moved towards setting up career paths in insolvency, insolvency examinations and qualifications - a feat that would take years to manage and even longer to graduate its first qualified license holders - a stop-gap needed to be found.

The solution? Grandfathering.

Grandfathering is a UK legal concept based on the concept of legislation NOT being retrospective - whereby those who had acted as Liquidators, Receivers and Trustees in Bankruptcy in the past (and who were not obvious "cowboys") could receive a license on application.

The result - a smooth transition.

Jo Johnson's Teaching Excellence Framework highlights University academics and their qualifications.  Many, in the past 20 years, since the inception of the Higher Education Academy and its forerunners , have gained "teaching" qualifications.  However, many older and senior academics who already held tenure or at least jobs before the notion of qualifications arose have not.  Amongst them, brilliant teachers, enthusiastic and expertly informed communicators, leaders in their fields.  Are they to be less valued under the new TEF regime?

The solution? Grandfathering.

Market failure in HE

New and “alternative” providers of HE in the UK sector not only have financial, reputational  and resource barriers to overcome to be able to compete with established Universities but also legal ones that curtail access to systems and groupings built up by Universities over the years.  The Uk government's consultation paper on Teaching Excellence Framework wonders if the playing field should be levelled.

 New providers (Pearson / BPP in the business sector, for example) – enjoy the ability to invest in new technology without legacy costs and without the need or requirement to establish a research presence or suffer its expensive overhead.  But is PRICE the only component of the market?  How do traditional Univesities add value to teaching and learning?

The clear way for traditional Universities to compete with the “alternative” proposition is to ensure that the research undertaken actually adds considerable value to teaching.  In terms of “research” we must see the value of “scholarship” in its wider sense and not simply 4* papers appropriate for REF.

An alternative way to approach the “new” providers is to embrace them in mutually beneficial partnerships.  They are different bodies, not interested in becoming Universities per se but interested in exploiting the market opportunities available through traditional provider failure.

New providers threaten the “easy money” previously enjoyed by Universities -and it’s about time they stepped up to the plate and competed on grounds of quality.

"Second class" lecturers

Business Schools teach about successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) businesses where strategic missions are fully supported by an appropriate mix of resources.  Taking Google as a success story we can see clearly the mix of technical, entrepreneurial, marketing , financial and people management expertise that combine to make the company a good place to build a career (so we are told) and a successful place to invest the pension pot.
So, you would expect that a Business School would balance in the mix of lecturers and professors in business education as suggested in AACSB Standard 15 ?
In brilliant business consultancy style AACSB identifies a 2 x 2 matrix of academic staff sorted by sustained activity (either scholarly / research or applied / practice) and point of entry (either PhD route or via a professional career).  This gives 4 "classes" of lecturer:

Key: SP = Scholarly Practitioner; IP = Instructional Practitioner; SA = Scholarly Academic and PA = Practice Academic.

Clearly SAs are the traditional model of Research focused academics, able to command the title "Professor", be feted in International conferences, draw high salaries...  If they can communicate with mere earthlings in order to be effective teachers then that's a bonus.  SP's can also gain this academic high ground, through embracing the SA career path.  Often SAs have enough about them to communicate well with students and teach effectively - "real world" experience it is called - as if Business School s are not actually "the real world".

IPs and PAs, however, are the second class lecturers.  These are often effective and popular teachers, charged with student satisfaction, programme management and delivery, recruitment and retention etc.  Typically they do not enjoy the title of "Professor", do not draw high salaries but quietly ensure that the main source of revenue for the School (its student fees) are maintained.  And, let's not forget the administrative and support staff who sweep up after all of the academics.

When a successful Business School needs a mix of resources you would expect to see equal incentives and rewards for all of the AACSB categories - wouldn't you?

Quick and dirty beats slow but measured feedback

Let me warm to the theme started in my last blog - the need for lecturers and students to know where the "goalposts" are in relation to assessments in their HE studies.
Clearly lecturers need to develop a clear, consistent, relevant, appropriate and communicated set of assessment criteria to allow their students to achieve the learning outcomes for the lesson, course or programme.  These can often be expanded to a range of descriptors that explain a particular level of achievement - such as the example from a FHEQ Level 6 taught module for the assessment criterion "Analysis / Discussion / Evaluation":

By selecting the descriptor for the chosen criterion the marker can begin to indicate the level of performance of the individual student.  There is also good scope to add some "feed forward", a suggestion, or two, about how the work could be improved.

So, for an assignment scoring 60 - 69% the feedback could be:

A good attempt to analyse or prioritise issues and to draw conclusions.  The example of XYZ corporation's new JIT system showed the key costs and benefits clearly.  To improve the work an example of JIT failing to work would give a more rounded picture.

So, well considered and well designed marking criteria, communicated at the outset, become the basis for clear feedback that can be made to have an individual focus for each student - as the following continuum shows:

Contrast this will the in-line comments on a script, the careful summary of points at the end of a piece of work.  Yes, it is less focused on the individual, yes, it can look like the tutor is using a mechanical way of marking but it does have the advantage of quicker turnaround for the student, efficiency for the marker and a clear and consistent set of standards - whether the paper is marked on a Monday morning or a Friday evening.

"Goal Line Technology" in Higher Education

So was Geoff Hurst's wonder goal in the 1966 World Cup final actually a goal?  English (and Russian standards say - "yes" but German standards say "no") - and all that had to be decided was whether a ball had gone over a line...

So how much more tricky is it for the University teacher to decide whether a piece of work meets the standard when there's so much more to it than simply going over a line on the grass.

Standards for Higher Education are set by articulating learning outcomes (intended learning outcomes (ILOs) , that is) for particular courses of study.  Often learning theories such as Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Outcomes is used to show progression of achievement and expectation as studies progress.  These can include the ability to describe or explain, apply a concept, analyse and evaluate data or information and synthesise information from a number of sources.

So, when ILOs are articulated, it becomes relatively simple to design assessment that has the aim of assessing a student's ability to - describe, apply, analyse etc.  It then becomes simple to set the "goalposts" by writing and sharing with students the clear criteria to be used in assessing their work.  Students know what to aim for and teachers know what they are looking for (this becomes very important when marking a large cohort of students' work as part of a team of markers).  Further, ranges of achievement against specific criteria can be articulated.

Then, and here's the beauty of the scheme, feedback can be structured to respond to the student's abilities in that particular aspect of the criteria.  Feed-forward can show students how marks can be improved in the future.

If the 1966 World Cup happened today we would (just) have goal-line technology to determine whether England's third goal was actually a goal.  So why do University teachers still resemble the Russian linesman in the way that they make decisions?  Vague, uncertain, subjective - in fact no help to the students who should be learning through the whole experience.