I suspect that if I told many of my fellow academics that I kept a blog, they would tell me that I am wasting my time, and should get on with some "proper" writing. To a degree, I can understand their sentiment. One assumes that blogs will not exactly register in any new Research Excellence Framework, for all that they represents one possible "outreach" activity that the government seems so keen to encourage in academia.


Nevertheless, I am continually surprised by how beneficial blogging can be, both as a way of maintaining my writing skills at times when the demands of teaching kick in, but also because of the number of times a post has developed my thinking about a particular topic, in a way that I could pick up later in my mainstream academic activities. A perfect example of this came the other day, when I was teaching A Doll's House for the Open University.

I have taught this play for several years at my other institution, but this was my first time teaching it at the OU, and the approach was somewhat different. Whereas I had previously taught the play for its relevance in terms of the advent of dramatic realism and the turn away from the well-made play conventions of the preceding nineteenth century, for the OU the play was treated in relation to its performances of gender. My students and I were asked to think about the ways in which the play might be updated to a more contemporary setting, and how this would affect our perceptions of Ibsen's original.

Whilst the play may have been well-familiar to me, this approach was new, then, but it did not take me very long to think of a way into teaching it. Last year, on this blog, I posted the day after I had seen a performance of the play which set it in the 1950s. In that long post, I wrote about the intriguing stage set of the Northern Stage production, which used transparent walls and a 1950s living room; both aspects were really thoughtful interventions. The transparency highlighted Ibsen's dramatic method in exploiting the gap between what an audience knows about every character, and what any one character knows about any other; the 1950s setting  helped to construct Torvald as a man who we knew, with historical hindsight, would be thrust into the radical changes of the 1960s soon after Nora's final exit.

This, then, was one of my routes into teaching the play, and the implications of updating and directing.the drama. Now I am pretty confident that had I not spent a morning - at that time arguably a wasted morning - writing a semi-essay about the play last year, I would not have remembered it now. The delight of blogging, as with all writing, is that it forces one to develop and tease out ideas; had I not written about it, my immediate reactions after the performance would have drifted away almost as quickly as the crowd flowing from the theatre. Of course, one could say that I could have written about it without a blog. The theatre diary, for example, has a long and privileged heritage. However, I do feel that the public nature of a blog, where my thoughts would be shared and, in the case of blogging about a theatre production, picked up by others searching for reviews of the play, stimulated me into writing when I might otherwise have gone on with other, allegedly more important, things.

I will admit to feeling a slight sense of smugness, then, when my preparation for this topic came round. I could not have known when I blogged back then that it would be relevant. But a blog, capturing seemingly trivial and ephemeral incidents and thoughts, turns out once again to have been serendipitously prescient and relevant.

Labels: A Doll's House, blogging, University Life

Maybe in the past I have been too naive, too trusting, or simply not quick-witted enough. But through my initial five years of university teaching, I had not encountered a single case of severe plagiarism. It is common enough to find the odd first year student forgetting to put a quote in quotation marks; so too might they quote or paraphrase a critic that they had heard spoken about in lectures, without chasing up the original source. Oddly, though, more common are students who diligently reference lectures and tutorials, so scared are they of being accused of plagiarism.

But if I had not come across serious plagiarism - more bad but understandable habits from new students - something must have been in the air over the last three weeks, when I have had to deal with three separate cases, all in students who were at level two, and who should therefore have known better. The three cases are instructive, though, because they show the very different ways in which plagiarism can manifest itself; they have also been a good learning experience for me, having discussed the theory of plagiarism at length (including on this website) but never having encountered it from a first-hand, teacher's perspective. Without compromising the anonymity of the students, I throw the cases up here in the interests of sharing my experience for new teachers, and also for proving to students that plagiarism will eventually get spotted.

Case One: The Lift
The first case was in some ways the easiest to deal with. The student in question had lifted large parts of a journal article and passed this off as their essay, without attributing the source either in footnotes or in a bibliography. It took about three sentences to spot this happening. Only an academic would be boring enough to want to write about the bodily functions of Finnegan's Wake.

Oddly, precisely because it was so extensive, the plagiarism here was more a symptom than the problem. For all their wiles, whinges, and late night essay-writing binges, I have a positive view of students - and I do not believe any would do this without some good or, rather, serious underlying reason. I was concerned not so much for the plagiarism itself, which was blatant, as for what it revealed about the student's welfare. Clearly, something was happening behind the scenes that had made them desperate enough to copy at such length, and blind enough to think they could get away with it.

In this case, then, I immediately referred it up the academic line, for someone with an overview of all that student's work and past history, who could probe the issue more deeply.

Case Two: The Sneak
In many ways, this was the most obnoxious of the three, even though the plagiarism was the least extensive. Here, the student had written an essay that was clearly their own work on the whole; the topic was so specific as to have made it virtually impossible for them simply to cull an entire paper. It was a good, but not spectacular essay. However, lurking in the middle of it were two sentences that simply did not sound right. To my ear they seemed just too, well, academicky. Literary academics have a way of writing that is sophisticated, precise, but also slightly clunking. They also sprinkle - nay, litter - it with jargon. Who in daily life uses the words "cultural paradigm"? One would expect the differences in writing style between a good student and an academic to be barely perceptible, but actually they stood out a mile here.

The two sentences that had been lifted verbatim were not referenced, nor was the source included in the bibliography. Ironically, this was probably a case of double plagiarism, because when I Googled the phrases, it led me to a discussion forum thread, where the entry had purportedly been written by a junior school student. I think not.

There were two depressing things here. The first was that my student had tried to deceive me. They were perfectly capable of writing a good essay on their own, but had slipped these in so as to make me think better of them. Of course, the student protested that they had just failed to note down the source when drafting the essay - which may well be true, but it is hard not to be more suspicious of a genuine motive rather than pure carelessness.

However, the more depressing thing is that the student had clearly discovered these quotes via a Google search, the same search that allowed me to pull them out. Rather than carefully selecting a journal article or library resources to read and summarise for their essay, they had turned to the search box as a quick way of finding something directly relevant to whatever terms they plugged in. As I said, the source was actually a discussion board for junior school students, which is hardly what one might call academically reliable (even though my hunch is that the school student here had themselves plagiarised from an academic source).

This, then, exposed the research habits that I suspect are common to many students - and which, I confess, I have slipped into as well. Rather than constructing an essay from the ground up, assembling and integrating diverse ideas from selected academic sources to develop a new concept in their work, this essay seemed to have been more built from the top down. The student had seemingly developed their own thoughts and written in a flow of personal ideas, then simply plugged in anything that seemed handily to correspond to their points.

This case, then, shows that referencing is not simply something one should do as an afterthought to the process of writing an essay. Rather, it is intrinsic to a whole research methodology and approach from the outset. Thinking about what needs to be referenced at the end of the writing process should encourage one from the start of the process to go directly to the most reliable sources - namely those on reading lists and in scholarly databases online - rather than to use a web search towards the end, scattering cherry-like soundbites on the surface of the essay.

Case Three: The Bad Habit
If both the above cases were clear in terms of their implications, this was perhaps the trickiest and most ambiguous of the three. Here the student had read a great deal of critical material, and diligently listed it in their bibliography. However, scattered throughout the essay were sentences or phrases that had been lifted from this material, without being referenced. The student had also given evidence from the primary text that corresponded with the evidence selected from some of the secondary criticism, whilst some of the general ideas were also interrelated.

Immediately, then, this was a grey area that applies to plagiarism in general. Including phrases without attribution was clearly unacceptable. But how about the places where the student had selected evidence for their argument that was substantially derived from the arguments of the critics? Given that at this level we would hardly expect any student to come up with original ideas, and indeed they would be expected to rely quite heavily on lectures, tutorials and course readings lists without necessarily needing to reference all of these, how far should one complain about something that is fairly derivative? Isn't this ultimately the case for most work below PhD level?

This is one of the tricky balancing acts that undergraduate students must learn. Tricks like introducing a paragraph by saying "Critic x has explored the possibility that novel y is about x" come in handy, because a student can then structure ideas and evidence that are derived from the critic, without having to litter their work with references for every tiny point of detail.

This case also highlights the importance of a bibliography. Even though the student had not referenced every relevant moment, at least I knew that they had got their ideas from somewhere outside of their own heads, even if I could not pin down precisely which were the student's words and concepts, and which the critics'.

But this also made me reflect on whether we as teachers do enough not only to press home the importance of referencing, but also to explain that using the work of others does not represent a failure on the part of a student. This particular student was otherwise really good. Their earlier work had been of the highest order. They had clearly put in a lot of effort to read around the topic in this case, too. I suspect, then, that they had not referenced every source not only perhaps because of poor note-taking habits, but also because of their fear that I would somehow see their essay as inferior because it relied on other critics rather than independent engagement with the text.

This is why I think we ought to do more from the outset of a literature course to explain that at this level, literary research may well be more like in the sciences. In the latter, there is no shame in citing any factual detail; indeed, it is the very test of a good research paper that it will do this, advancing new knowledge only by a tiny increment, pushing off against a far larger body of old knowledge in the background. Similarly in literary studies, what is being tested in an undergraduate assignment is not the soft skill of the student's ability to write creatively and spontaneously, and to have a passionate but critically refined assessment of literature, but the harder skills of reading around, researching and integrating different ideas into a new essay. This skill of synthesising the work of others is one reason why employers value English graduates so highly; it is the same sort of skill needed to write a business report, or produce a Powerpoint presentation.

We might like to pretend that the ideal English student follows the Arnoldian model, someone whose aesthetic ears have been carefully tuned so as to be pitch-perfect, able to identify and explain what makes good literature. But as Matthew Arnold showed in his "blind reading" exercises, even the best students can not be taught interpretation from the bottom; critical sensitivity is something that is only gradually acquired through practice and the continued effort of reading and critical writing. What those of us teaching at the undergraduate level ought to be stressing, then, is not that the best essays are necessarily the intuitive ones that emerge from the student's mind alone. Rather, the good essay will digest of the minds of others. Whilst we can't "teach" Arnoldian interpretation, we can teach the fundamentals of referencing, researching, selecting sources and so on, that can be the equally good route to a sound literary essay, and ultimately to the student's employability.

In Conclusion
Whilst impressionistic criteria cannot help but inform our marking, I do believe that a good essay will not only sound right, it will also do right as well. It will not only have some ephemeral sense of the student being a good, intuitive reader of primary literary texts; it will have the hard indications of the student being a diligent, thorough reader of secondary materials, and someone who gets their references correct.

Recently, at one of the universities at which I teach, the student newspaper's editorial complained about different standards across academic departments. Some subject do not give specific credit for referencing and bibliographies, whilst some award equal marks to getting referencing right as they do to the quality of the arguments themselves. Whilst I would not necessarily go this far, all the cases of plagiarism I have encountered above do make me think that we should specify a certain percentage for the quality of referencing and selection of sources, rather than what is written per se. Not only would this be a further check on plagiarism - students will do everything they can to get the "easy" marks - it would also convey the truer, modern view of undergraduate literary studies which is that it inculcates not just the soft ideology of originality, but the hard, testable skills of researching, summarising and referencing well.

This is my controversial conclusion from the teacher's point of view. The conclusion from the student's point of view should be less ambiguous: plagiarism will get discovered. Probably, the odd case slips a reader's eye. No doubt many students use search engines to pluck ideas which they then paraphrase, rather than reading selected secondary criticism which they explicitly summarise and reference. However, sooner or later, a teacher will discover plagiarism, and when it does it lays bear all those bad habits. No matter what the practical implications on marks, being accused (and, for that matter, accusing a student) of plagiarism is a nasty process to have to go through. There is no point running the risk.

Labels: plagiarism, University Life

Over the summer, I was (more by luck than skill, I suspect) appointed as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. This is the first of two posts contrasting the OU with the more conventional university at which I have taught part-time for several years. This post gives my impressions of the OU as an institution; the second will look at the differences between OU and conventional students.

I have long felt that the Open University does things differently. When I was younger, I remember our kitchen table continually covered with papers, and colourful textbooks; DVDs and software CDs would randomly drop through the letterbox; and, in the middle of the night, the video player would suddenly start whirring, recording some OU broadcast. This was because my dad took an OU course every year, finally earning his second BSc after twelve years hard slog.

Today, I stand on the other side of the OU fence. I recently got a post as an Associate Lecturer on one of the OU's English Literature courses. Having seen the way the OU worms its way into the home life and domestic environments of students sitting courses, suddenly the OU has infiltrated my own kitchen table and scattered its papers on the floor of my bedroom, as I grapple with the demands of teaching a new course, and integrating myself into the rules and procedures of this organisation.

Whilst I always knew the OU was unique among universities, I never realised until now quite how remarkable an institution it is. Over 200 000 students enrol to study with the OU each year. Of these, around 20 000 students are studying an OU course outside the UK; many are ex-pats, or members of the armed forces, but many too are foreign students who welcome the opportunity to make contact with a world-recognised institution. Over two thirds of students will be working whilst studying. 15% of students come from disadvantaged communities.

Even for those not studying formally, the OU makes itself felt. Each week, there are around 50 000 downloads of OU podcasts from iTunes. Two million people access the freely available teaching and learning materials from the Open Learn website. Millions more watch OU supported television programmes, such as the BBC's Coast.

The sheer scale of the organisation is mind-boggling, and utterly unlike any other, mainstream Higher Education institution. And yet what strikes me most as an Associate Lecturer is that at its heart lies an intimate relationship between teachers and students. The idea of an OU course is that the actual teaching is done through the carefully-prepared study materials, such as course books and audio-visual materials. The tutor is not a lecturer in the conventional sense, delivering information and setting tests. The role of a tutor is simply to be on hand to offer some pointers and clarification when a student becomes stuck, to deliver tutorials which again help to draw out some of the issues on the course, and to mark assignments with detailed feedback.

With this theoretically proscribed remit, it would be easy for the OU to offer tutor support for courses en masse. In the digital age, students could post queries on message boards, and a central team of tutors could moderate and respond to them. Largely, the student community could be self-supporting, with students offering each other advice. This does happen to a degree, with students setting up lively Facebook groups, for example. However, although the OU might be run as a purely distance learning organisation, with staff too kept at arm's length, core to student support in the OU remains the allocation of a single tutor, to one small group of students (around 20 in my case).

Students may never get to see me in person (since my students are based in Europe), but they will always know that I am at the end of an email or phone line. In that respect, the student-teacher relationship encouraged by the OU is even more intimate than in a traditional university, where a tutor might lecture to 200 students, or have dozens of small tutorial groups to supervise. Already this year I have had more "contact" with my OU students than with my students at my other, conventional university.

It is quite clear that the OU is a student-centred organisation. It has to be. Its whole raison d'etre when founded forty years ago was to widen the availability of Higher Education to students. At the same time, though, the OU has had continually to attract students in order to sustain itself. Albeit often with generous financial support available for those who could not otherwise afford it, students have always paid fees and the OU is conscious that without students, it would cease to exist. It was, in this sense, forty years ahead of the game of tuition fees, which turned students into consumers.

As I have been complaining recently on this blog, conventional universities have no room to provide more contact hours or support for students who are now paying fees, because it is still the research which brings in most money. As an OU lecturer, though, I am told that I am expected to support my students based on their needs. If a student needs additional help, there is a mechanism to reimburse me, as I can request overtime payments. By contrast at my mainstream university, if any student needs more than the basic tuition, or additional pastoral care, I have to support them at my own time and expense.

On the flip side, the OU also seems genuinely to care about its Associate Lecturers, all of whom teach purely on a part time basis, often alongside other jobs. It would be easy to pass the buck of professional development on to other organisations, or expect lecturers (who may already be established academics) to fend for themselves. Instead, from the moment I received my training pack it was clear that the OU will invest and support me, in a way that sets a good example for my own relationship with students.

For example, the OU offers a course fee waiver for Associate Lecturers, and runs a range of courses that might be relevant to teaching within and beyond the OU. Part of my salary is stipulated as professional development time, and although it is left on trust whether I will actually do any, the fact that it is highlighted as a separate payment speaks volumes. I am allocated a mentor who I can approach with the picky concerns that are not worth raising with a line manager. A sample of my essays will be double marked, and I will get to see the moderator's comments; in my other university job, by contrast, I have never been told about external examiners' reports, despite me marking half the year group for one module last year, and have had specifically to ask whether my marks had to be pushed up, down, or were just right.

But. I would not be an academic if I did not judiciously balance the positives with negatives. And although my view of the OU has been very positive thus far, and I am proud to be associated with an organisation that does so much to support those who would otherwise be disenfranchised from Higher Educations, already there are some things that gripe.

There is - what else? - that old issue of pay. The OU at least has the decency to state that I should be working for 6 hours a week, which puts to shame my other university which assumes that it takes 1 hour to prepare for a 1 hour tutorial. Joke. Even so, the 6 hours very easily vanishes. I am probably working twice that each week at the moment, because I have to learn the course for the first time, as well as to teach it. Given that students on my course should be studying for 15 hours a week...well, you do the maths. Having said that, I expect that next year, with more experience behind me, the 6 hours should become a fairer representation.

The issue which has surprised and frustrated me most, though, is the awful and incoherent IT infrastructure behind the OU enterprise. There are several different websites all doing comparable things within interfaces that all look different and un-integrated (Open Learn, Student Home, Tutor Home, Platform First Class, Intranet Home). The email and forum software belongs in a museum of early 1990s bulletin boards: there is no threading, 100 MB of storage, no search function, poor attachment support, an awful address book, no mobile or push email support. A project is underway to replace this old system with something that may live up to the vain name First Class. But we have had richly interactive websites and communication tools for the last decade, and given that part of the OU's remit is to drive forward educational technologies, it is shockingly behind the times with its own virtual learning environment (VLE).

Similarly, the way my tutorials work is ridiculously quirky. Because my students are scattered across Europe, we hold tutorials via a telephone conferencing system. This involves an operator phoning round each participant in turn, which occupies 5 to 10 minutes of a 45 minute tutorial; we then hold a conversation across a time-delayed, echoing line. I must not overrun my tutorials, since the international operator-assisted calling charges are significant. Neither must the calls go through to students' mobiles.

But there is another way of running conferencing cheaply and easily, with me in full control. You may have heard of it. It is called VoIP. It would be easy for me to install software on my own PC that would allow me to conference call students, either to their phones or computers or mobiles, for nothing more than the cost of a local rate phone call. Like all large institutions, I guess the OU must be slow to turn on to new technological opportunities. But as the one at the sharp end of a rubbish and costly phone line, who could run a VoIP conference with the click of a mouse, the rigidity of the old system is frustrating and, again, surprising given the OU's remit to promote virtual and distance learning.

To be fair to the OU, it is not alone in being a Higher Education institution that struggles with the internet age. My other university uses the god-awful, snail-slow, user-unfriendly Blackboard. However, whilst in mainstream universities such VLEs are an addendum to conventional teaching methods (lectures and tutorials), the VLE is increasingly the main face of the OU for students and, for that matter, for Associate Lecturers.

Even so, a gripe about technology should be set in the context of the fact that the OU works, and works brilliantly for a large and diverse body of students who would otherwise not have access to study. In my second blog post, I will look at how these students seem to differ from "conventional" ones who have slipped directly from college into university.

Labels: Open University, teaching, University Life, virtual learning

A.C. Grayling has just written a comment piece in The Guardian complaining that more "contact hours" do not equate to a better education. This is the belief apparently held by Peter Mandelson, who in calling for universities to become more commercially responsive to their consumers (i.e. students), has focused on contact time as a prime way in which universities should compete to attract students.

Grayling remarks that Mandelson has misunderstood the nature of a university, especially in Arts and Humanities subjects:

University is emphatically not about spoon-feeding and hand-holding through courses, but the very opposite. It is not about maximising contact hours, but about autonomy in thinking, researching and writing.

This is fundamentally true. The job of a university teacher is not just to deliver the maximum amount of information in the most efficient way (one can imagine this idea might appeal to Mandelson, though) but to encourage students to learn independently. This is why the single most popular career destination for English Literature graduates is business and consultancy. It does not matter to an accountancy or financial firm that a student can recite twelve Keats poems, or tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. What matters is that in discussing texts in tutorials, in reading critical material, and in writing essays about literary works, the English student becomes able to summarise information, write accurately, and present confidently. They have also proved that they can study independently in a library, without needing a teacher to look over them and crack a whip.

Giving an arts and humanities student the equivalent number of contact hours as a science student - where the delivery of raw information, which can be applied to a relevant vocation such as engineering, does matter - would entirely negate a key benefit of having a pool of graduates emerging from non-skills based courses. Again, one suspects Mandelson will rather miss this point.

The hard core of Grayling's argument, then, is difficult to dispute, for all that he whimsically recites soft Aristotelian ideals: "We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure." However, as I have commented recently on this blog, the leaders of universities - who did not have to pay tuition fees themselves - grossly underestimate the financial hardship of current students, and consistently take the attitude that students are a problem to be minimised, rather than fee-paying consumers. When staff are torn between giving more contact time to students, or researching more, the former invariably gives way.

Whilst universities, especially in the Arts and Humanities, should be concerned with allowing students to learn independently, and contact hours are not the be all and end all of a good education, this does not mean that universities currently give value for money. Indeed, the lifetime earnings of arts and humanities graduates may not beat those of people who leave school aged 16, and so if students are to take a hefty loan burden long into their lifetimes, universities need to ensure that they offer value for money in the broadest possible sense of "value," which may mean providing more teaching for the crucial three years.

Students on a typical Arts and Humanities course may have only around 10 contact hours a week. With current tuition fee levels, that works out at around £40 per student per hour, and considerably more (into three figures) for a body of students in a seminar or lecture. Surely students have the right to feel aggrieved when lecturers remain uncontactable, or unable to offer any more than the minimum, or when other resources do not come up to scratch?

How does it help a student to learn independently when it can take two months for them to get an essay back from a tutor? How does it help students to learn independently when the only comment at the bottom of an essay is "well done"? How does it help students to learn independently when course books are not accessible or even stocked in a university's over-stretched library? How does it help a student to learn independently when a tutor does not have time to offer pastoral support if a student is encountering domestic, personal or financial difficulties beyond their control?

All of these examples are things I have encountered first hand as a student and university tutor. All of these examples speak not of staff who do not care, or of students who expect too much, but of universities and staff stretched on the rack of teaching and research, with the latter currently dominating.

I also teach for the Open University, and the quality of contact and support students have from tutors is astonishing in comparison to traditional universities. Yet the OU is also one of the best institutions educating through independent learning. Universities ought not to aim to maximise contact hours in any quantitative sense; but they have a long way to go before they offer value for money through quality of contact, in the way the OU has done since its inception as a student-centred organisation.

Maximising contact hours would not automatically give students a better education; indeed, for Arts and Humanities graduates who prove their ability to work without supervision, it might even be counter-productive. However, that badge of "contact hours" offers a very useful focal point around which to have the necessary debate about whether fee paying students are really getting the quality of experience they deserve. It should also focus the minds of deans and vice chancellors into realising that you cannot squeeze more out of overworked staff if they must do both teaching and research. If teaching needs to be improved, then more staff need to be employed. This is the simple equation that will, almost certainly, become the outcome of higher tuition fees.

It may not be good for the idea of the university, where those doing the cutting edge research are, currently, also those who provide inspirational teaching; it will almost certainly lead us to follow the American model where graduate teaching assistants do as their name suggests, whilst a few faculty Professors do research full time. However, these consequences are only to be expected when students have become consumers. For student-consumers as they exist now, the quality (and perhaps quantity) of teaching matters, and it is a good thing that Mandelson has raised that "contact hours" spectra, to give students a hook on which to hang their demands, and to give them hard figures to force their universities to respond to their current imbalance in favour of research.

Labels: contact hours, student loans, tuition fees, University Life

In a thinly disguised attempt to prepare the ground ahead of raising the cap on university tuition fees (which seems inevitable no matter whether Labour or the Conservatives win the next general election), the business secretary Peter Mandelson has said that students, as "consumers of the higher education experience," need to demand more from their universities to help them drive up standards and offer better value for money.

On the face of it, you might expect me to agree with him. As I blogged recently, as a university teacher who has a massive student debt himself, I feel that modern universities - led by a generation of deans, vice-chancellors and department heads who merrily strolled through with grants - fail to acknowledge just what a pressured position students find themselves in, and they consequently take student demands for extra or better contact hours as an affront rather than their right. Meanwhile, students do not fully recognise their own value as fee paying customers, and are still in awe of staff who are forced to focus on research rather than teaching, and so students fail to make additional legitimate demands both on their teachers and on universities, who should divert more of their fat fees into teaching resources rather than research.

There is also, admittedly, something of the bemoaned student apathy at work, and it was not surprising that Mandelson invoked the spirit of the radical 1960s to inspire student-consumer pressure:

As students who go into higher education pay more, they will expect more and are entitled to receive more in terms not just of the quality of courses, but the whole experience they receive during their time in the higher education system. If there is a degree of passivity, then I hope that without enjoining our student population to take to the barricades, I hope they will be more picky, demanding and choosy as consumers of the higher education experience.

Putting the onus on students to pull their universities up might, then, seem a positive thing. Yet it misses out one glaringly obvious, horrible trap that lies in wait should the fees be raised again.

At the moment, with lower top-up fees, most universities charge the full amount money, £3 145 in 2008-2009. There is, therefore, not much of a market in Higher Education, and students go where their grades take them, and accept the teaching they are given. But were the fee cap to be lifted, with some muttering about £5000 as a starting point, the marketplace would become more diverse, with some universities charging markedly less in an attempt to attract students. This is what New Labour and the Higher Education sector have clamoured for all along; it has just taken some time for them to incrementally legislate up the tuition fee ladder (or should that be down the slippery slope?).

In this new environment, rather than students pulling university teaching standards up, students would go to the university they can afford, with variable teaching standards attendant on that. It has already been seen that students from the poorest backgrounds are deterred from university, despite promises of substantial grants and bursaries. Charging higher fees would mean that even students who want to go to university in principle, will be more likely to choose those they can most afford. Meanwhile, students from affluent backgrounds, who will also more likely have received better secondary and tertiary educations, will go to universities (often the red bricks) that perhaps need to be less innovative and offer fewer contact hours in teaching, because of the higher standard of student they attract. Such students might well be more apathetic when it comes to making increased demands of their institutions. Meanwhile, students from less positive educational backgrounds, who are more likely to be forced to choose cheaper universities, may worry about the poor quality of the teaching, but will be confronted with that old capitalist equation between peanuts and monkeys. They will be told to shut up like well-behaved consumers, because they got what they paid for.

Whilst his motivating of students was a good thing, Mandelson was misguided in his reasons for doing so. With higher tuition fees looming, the starting point should not be to expect that students will drive standards in the Higher Education market, but to require universities to pull standards up from the top. Higher Education is not a consumer product like a car, or television, or computer. Unlike in the retail sector, a marketplace in Higher Education will not lead to students/consumers to demand more, for less, forcing institutions to compete on teaching quality and value for money. This is because of the massive costs involved, at the early stage of life, which mean that some consumers are automatically going to be forced to aim for a lower priced institution; meanwhile, those who can aim higher are also the least likely to feel that the quality of their education is poor, because they are most likely equipped with the parental support and educational backgrounds to compensate for it. What might at first seem to be Mandelson's concern for a student centred Higher Education, actually revolves round his love affair with the market, and the university's lust for higher tuition fees, whatever the cost to the young.

Labels: Peter Mandelson, student loans, tuition fees, University Life

One of the pleasures of university life is the three months in summer when students depart, and rather than having to swim against a tide of preparation and marking, one actually gets to tread water, reflecting on what has gone before, and planning new strategies. For module conveners and heads of department, such planning usually means revising reading lists, syllabi, lectures, and exam papers in the wake of a burden of student feedback forms and external examiners' reports. But not being elevated to the position of a full-time academic, in my humble role as a part-time tutor, I get to reflect more modestly on my own teaching experience, and plan subtle but perhaps more exciting changes to my own teaching methods.

Over the summer, then, one plan I have implemented has been to build myself a personal website to showcase my research and CV and, rather less vainly, to support my teaching through technologies that are not offered by the university's central virtual learning environment. For example, having moved to an online calendar, I post my free/busy information so students can check when they can meet me if they need an appointment. I also offer anonymous teaching feedback questionnaires. However, the most exciting element of the website is my new Twitter account.

Long one of the Twitterati under the not-so-pseudonymic alibrown18, this coming academic year, I will be using another Twitter account purely in support of teaching (I will not give it out here, precisely because it is designed for my students, not the use of you, Joe Public). In this blog post, I explain my rationale behind using Twitter, and anticipate some of the problems and potential benefits as a technological aid to traditional teaching and email contact methods.

Rationale

One thing that surprises me as a teacher is how few emails I get asking intellectual-type questions, where a student is struggling to comprehend material and wants some help, or where a student is carrying out their own research for essays and would like some pointers. There are far fewer than one might have expect given that they have so little contact time with me over the year. Of course, just about once a minute I receive an email along the lines of "my printer has broken, can I have another month to write my essay?" but it is rare for a student to ask me something less practical, and more discursive. Whilst this might suggest that I am unapproachable, or that I give off the whiff of "I'm too busy doing research, now leave me alone," I would prefer to think that I give the impression to students that they are welcome to ask me any questions they would like, to discuss essays or other concerns. Why, then, do so few approach me with questions that indicate fresh engagement or problems with their course content?

One clue might lie in the style of the relatively few discursive emails that I do receive. We live in a culture in which, so we are told, students would write essays via text speak and emoticons if they could get away with it. Given this, I am always surprised that when I receive a email from a student, they are most often carefully-crafted, literate, and considered. Students are usually apologetic for having "bothered" me, even if the question being asked was worthy and interesting. Coupling this with the fact that I receive fewer dialectical emails than might be expected, my suspicion is that students are put off from asking intellectual questions for fear of sounding stupid. They do not want to seem to be asking that question that might be deemed too simple, and hence too much of a bother to a busy tutor. Thus students may get so bogged down in worrying about how they can express their question, that few of them actually do so, not being prepared to write through a careful email expressing their thoughts.

As a very different form of electronic exchange, with a 140 character limit the very nature of Twitter defies extended talk. It is, however, potentially very useful for precisely the reason that intrinsically no question or comment a student poses there can be a deep one, though it may nevertheless point towards hidden complexities and undercurrents of thought in the student's mind. The additional level of informality might encourage more hesitant, or less articulate, students to use this medium instead of email. I can at this stage imagine messages like, "Help. I really want 2 write about science in Conrad's Secret Agent. What should I read?" or "Is the passage in Pride and Prejudice on p.49 free indirect discourse?"

Naturally, such questions would require an extended, probably emailed, reply. But the important issue here is about opening a channel of communication between student and tutor, encouraging the student that the tutor is approachable and open to an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and recommendations.

A second motivation for using Twitter lies in the efficient way it can be used to share contemporary media stories, web links, or one's current reading. My thoughts on this benefit were sparked when in the middle of the last academic year I read Elaine Showalter's article in The Guardian review, showcasing her new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. At the time, I was teaching an American fiction course, and it struck me as apt that Showalter had touched a nerve about the masculine bias in American literature. Almost certainly, some of my students will have picked up on the article, or on one of her radio and web features around the time. Yet most may not have done.

Using a quick, informal tweet to direct students to the article would have made clear that this was neither essential reading, nor necessarily my view on the state of American literature, but that it might be of interest nonetheless. Based on my serendipitous research experiences of happening upon books in Oxfam or articles in the London Review of Books that sent my writing off into new and fertile fields, I firmly believe that research in the arts is as much about luck and the unexpected discovery than the predictable approach through the established reading list. Because of its brevity, tweets containing links or recommendations have the sense of happenstance about them. For example, I could only have posted: "Article by Showalter on which women writers are important in American Lit. http://bit.ly/H9fC4" It is then up to the student to read and decide for themselves what their opinion on this new criticism is.

On that note, a more ephemeral epistemological possibility might be raised through the use of microblogging teaching aids. Literature departments have come a long way since Arnold, Leavis, Eliot and their like populated their "great tradition" with dead, white, European males. Whilst many bemoan the postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist relativism that was - and still is - the reaction to this tradition, there is no doubt that today, English studies is in perpetual flux. The "canon," such as it is, shifts with the cultural climate and the intellectual tide. Just as Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing shook up the notion of the male tradition by perceiving a female line of literary inheritance, a new work by a major critic like Showalter will get noticed, will shift the boundaries of the discipline, will break the silo of "American Literature."

Yet in spite of the undermining of the tradition, even the best lecture courses can be slow to turn with the tide, perhaps introducing one or two different books a year, and certainly not rewriting material to reflect issues currently in the news, blogosphere, or literary media. The lecture course, doing its job of teaching efficiently and reliably week by week, has its place. Indeed, arguably the key merit of literary studies is its comparative stability. By discussing a common body of the best texts of a culture or time, a literature course sends a community of readers, who become workers, thinkers, and leaders, out into the world with a common humanistic framework derived from those books. But the lecture course that is the bedrock of such an idealistic (perhaps, today, slightly naive) ambition does not necessarily impart to students the sense of their subject today as dynamic, with long-cherished authors up for critical grabs, with new authors just waiting to be explored.

Now I would not suggest that Twitter, for all of its powerful Streisand effects on the media, is by itself capable of carrying a new culture into English studies. Nor indeed would such a revolution be a good thing. The whole beauty of posting subject news to Twitter is that its informal nature means that any links or reading suggested there will not fundamentally contradict central reading lists carefully constructed by module conveners. It will be clear that these reading lists and lectures are the core of course content. Yet any contemporary tweets may also inspire students' independent learning, encourage them to explore the less well-known books on course lists, and invest in them the sense of literary studies as a discursive game, rather than a one-way process where they suck well worn information out of eminent academics. What I would hope using Twitter will do as a teaching aid is to convey in students the sense of their subject as being alive in wider critical and lay society, so that individually students feel free to imagine new ways of approaching established texts. Additionally, if I use it to post my own reading as I prepare for teaching, this might convey the excitement of independent research in a way that could enthuse students.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is, of course, just one of many web tools that might help to support learning. Why, then, is it potentially better than any alternative platform or content sharing facility?

As I have already said, Twitter's 140 character limit is ideal for encouraging students to open communication spontaneously, rather than worrying about contacting a tutor to ask a potentially (to them) silly question. It also makes it easy for me to share links to articles or books, without feeling that I have to write a long email or blog post justifying my suggestion, and without implying that my suggestions are certainly better than those on reading lists.

Besides brevity, another benefit of Twitter is its simplicity. I can easily use a browser plugin (such as Echofon) or my mobile phone to post links or responses to students, without having to log-in to any university email or content management system.

Further, students can also follow my Twitter feed passively. I have in the past considered using Facebook as a teaching support, because it is ubiquitous among the student community and has straightforward facilities for discussions, such as the wall and message boards; it also has an events system which could be used to remind students of deadlines or meetings. However, feedback from my students on their tutorial questionnaires strongly suggested that students would see my use of Facebook as a breach of private walls. Firstly, students use Facebook to escape work, not to do it. Secondly, in order to create a teaching group, I would first need to befriend students and vice versa, meaning that we might be tempted to snoop on each other's profiles.

Twitter, however, requires no such exchange of personal details in order to allow a feed to be followed. Indeed, anxious students can actually "block" me from following them, whilst still being able to see me. I can also use Twitter's API to post tweets to my static teaching website (and one would hope that existing virtual learning platforms, such as the dreaded Blackboard, will make use of this architecture in future) so students can check there even if they are not signed-up members of Twitter. Tweets can also be followed as individual RSS feeds corresponding to a hash tag. So, for example, I can assign #drama to one module, #modernism to another, and students can follow only those feeds relevant to their subject. That Twitter is by nature a public medium also means that other students not directly taught by me can pick up on my feeds, helping to offer "parity of provision" between students taught by different tutors.

Finally, the use of the "retweet" convention would allow students to use my Twitter feed to share their own discoveries with their peers, without those students having to log on to a discussion board or compose a justificatory email. Such retweets could also be anonymised, if students fear being tagged as the class "geek," whilst they can be moderated more easily than a discussion board, if I feel the content is unsuitable or irrelevant. Indeed, such moderation, which would require me to contact the student explaining why I have not passed their suggestion on, might also draw out that the student is not engaged with the course reading in the best possible way.

The Test

Of course, all the above are hypotheses conceived in the dreamy days of the summer vacation. It may well be that students do not use Twitter to contact me with sparks of doubt or questions. It may be that few make use of my feeds on current subject news. It may also be that my university comes down on me for daring to use a technology that does not come under its official virtual learning environment, and for doing something that goes beyond the normal expectation of a tutor.

But I feel that, being early in my career, and not having the burden of a full-time academic job and associated admin and research, if I do not try these things now, I may never; or, rather, if it does work, I will be able (quite selfishly) to promote my technological innovation as an aspect to my CV, rather than something expected of a university tutor as will increasingly be the case over the next decade. At the moment, Twitter is surfing the wave of the Web 2.0 era, the hottest new technology since, well, Facebook last year. It would seem a real missed opportunity not to test how microblogging can work as a teaching tool.

The final question, though, because it is so cutting edge, is what the test of its success can be. Despite the mass of publicity, not everyone is familiar with Twitter, and despite being tech-savvy, students might think my use of the medium is a bit alien and strange. Perhaps they will not use it just because it is not yet prominent in their consciousnesses, the way Facebook is, and I would be wrong to be deflated if uptake is slow. A key problem of testing how my Twitter posts are used is that, whilst being open so that students can follow feeds in a number of ways without having to "befriend" me, this makes it impossible to apply metrics. How do I know whether my students are following me, or just random strangers? How do I know how many students without Twitter accounts are visiting my static website and actually reading the feeds there? How do I know how many have subscribed to the RSS feeds with a reader?

Further, if students do not use it to contact me with their questions, or to share their reading with their peers, does this suggest something intrinsic to many students (that they do not really want to actively engage with their learning and the intellectual potential of their subject, but simply want to pass the course), or does it suggest that this technology too has failed to unlock their discursive sides? If a few students do actively use it to chase up my reading suggestions or to ask questions, will my efforts taken to reach these few have been worthwhile, or are those the same students who would have excelled as learners anyway?

There is, at this stage, only one thing to do. In a couple of days, I have my first meetings with my students, when I will introduce my new website, and direct them to my Twitter stream. I will, quite shamelessly, get their feedback and thoughts. And hope that I will also, in a year's time, be posting here that it has been a resounding success. Wtch this spc. x.

Labels: Literature, teaching, twitter, University Life

Now although I regularly talk about my subject or teaching, I do not very often blog about policy at my university. I do not want to end up like Night Jack, the not-so-secret policeman blogger. But having already been made hot under the collar by the CBI's call for student tuition fees to be raised to £5000 and for the government's interest subsidy to be abolished, an experience at my university yesterday finally sent the steam hissing from my ears. I hope you can read this as anger bubbles out of this page. And you especially, student at the back of the class, should sit up and pay special attention, because this post is in your interests.

Yesterday, I was having my annual teaching induction in my department. One of the topics covered was marking - and returning - essays. That "returning" bit is important, because our university is pretty unique in that tutors have fifteen minute, one-on-one sessions with individual students, where we hand back the essay and talk through mistakes and positives with the student. It is the best moment of teaching we do all year, as it both allows tutors to get to know their students, and allows students to really understand how they can learn from their writing and mistakes.

But at the induction, it was let slip that the Dean of Arts has determined that the second of these two sessions is to be abolished. It is, apparently, too inefficient a use of staff time. There was no mention of what the students get out of it which is, if the annual feedback questionnaires are to be believed, a tremendous amount.

The second moment came later, as I sat with a literary theory module convenor. This particular module is content based: students have to learn and understand things, rather than simply being allowed to have opinions on texts. And literary theory being as obscure as it often is, students sometimes have problems with understanding its ideas. So I dared to suggest that, at the start of this year, I would stress to students that they must get in touch via email if there is anything they need additional help with. We could perhaps even arrange to meet one on one.

The phrase "parity of provision" came up in response. Since not all tutors will be so active, or too busy to respond to a plethora of emails, it is not fair of me to offer this to my students.

What makes me so angry is the failure to think of teaching time from the student point of view. Certainly, doing away with a handback session, or refusing to be on email call, will free up staff to do more research. This is the major aspect of universities that students do not often see. Yet what both the Dean and convenor seem to have forgotten is that students pay - yes, pay - to get taught.

This failure to think of the immense burden students are taking on, such that they not only have the need for education but the right to a good value one, is, it seems to me, a generational one. As a graduate of the class of 2003, I have £12 000 of debt at my back, and I am lucky - students leaving today can easily have twice that. Either way, with the inflation adjustment - correction, interest rate - on the loans, we could easily end up paying two or three times that over our lifetimes, something the CBI report seems to neglect in calling for a more commercial interest rate to be applied.

But the generation in charge of universities at the moment had an entirely free ride. At the well-paid level of lecturers and deans and vice-chancellors, the financial hardship students genuinely face both during their time at university, and long after it, must seem very distant. They simply cannot conceptualise the world that they have created, where from the student point of view, teaching is what they pay for at university, and is therefore its raison d'etre. Universities are certainly pulled in two directions - teaching and research - at once. But that is not the students' problem, when they find themselves at the fee-paying centre. What is their problem, though, is the sums; bear with me here - this matters.

At my university, students pay £3, 225 a year for tuition. In my department, they will have 21 hours of lectures times six modules (making 126 hours) plus 24 tutorials for those modules, plus (at the moment), 1.5 hours of essay handbacks across their 6 modules. That is 151.5 hours contact per year, which works out at around £21 per contact hour. That seems quite cheap, but remember that since each tutorial has 8 students, that means that the proportion of the tuition fee allocated to a tutorial contact hour is £168; for a lecture, which may have around 250 students, it is £5250. Of course, the university runs massive overheads to which tuition fees also contribute - such as a large library that students in English use extensively. But even so, in value terms, the university is getting a lot of money per tutorial or lecture, and given what little it pays me as tutor (I get paid £60 to do one hour's preparation plus hold the hour-long tutorial), there ought to be something of a surplus there.

Students today should be pretty upset, then, when tutors, or those in charge of university strategy, say that they should not expect any more contact with teachers. To my mind - the mind of someone who also paid for his education - students should feel very happy to make demands on lecturer's time, to ask questions about material they do not understand, or to have a lecturer go over their essay.

Instead, of course, the mythos surrounding the busy academic remains, making students terrified of approaching tutors. It is absolutely true that tutors or academic staff are extremely overworked because of the requirement to do research. But, to reiterate again, that ought not to be the student's problem. The problem instead lies with universities that will not provide sufficient staff to cover the needs of their - yes, that horrible but correct word - consumers.

It is striking to contrast the attitude of my university, which fails to see students in this light, with that of the Open University, at which I have recently started teaching as an Associate Lecturer (and about which I will blog more extensively later). As an organisation that charged its students from its inception in 1969, the OU has a different culture. For example, although I get paid a reasonable salary at the OU, if I find that I have a student who is making additional demands on my time - for example, they need me to telephone them once a week to help them towards their assignment - I can fill in a form and get paid for doing the extra hours. Clearly, the OU is different to a conventional university, and has fewer infrastructure overheads. Yet the OU sees supporting students as its primary role, understands that students have paid to be supported through their course, and make available the money to allow the tutor to do this. Further, by making that money available, this makes it clear to students that they can call on tutors, and to tutors that they should expect to be called on by students, since the workload of tutors can be expanded depending on the needs of students. This is not the attitude of my other university, despite the fact that students on the OU pay equivalent tuition fees to conventional university students. It is not surprising to find that the OU comes out at or near the top in student satisfaction surveys.

But if students at the OU are satisfied, one of the other problems at conventional universities is that students are not dissatisfied enough; or, rather, that they are not conscious of the gap between what they pay for, and what they actually get. If students are to become more determined in holding their universities to account, to get a fair return on their massive investment, they also need to be aware that they are investors in the first place (something quite evident to Open University students). At the moment, the application for a student loan is one more form a student will complete, along with choosing a halls of residence and ordering that new, branded hoodie. A prospective student - especially one from a privileged parental and educational background - will always aim to go to university, and the loan and tuition fees just seem like one more hoop to be jumped through to get there. Because of the nature of the loan, as one that silently accrues interest in the background but that will not bring the bailiffs knocking if not paid by a deadline, students rarely consider the effect it will have on them after university. Only realising the burden of the loan retrospectively, during their time as students they do not connect the education and contact hours they receive, with the fact that they are the ones who are paying for them. Lecturers, from the student point of view, may seem to be doing them a favour by teaching rather than researching, when in fact teaching is the core part of the "product" which students are buying.

My hope is that this will not last. When top-up fees come in, as is inevitable, or when commercial interest rates are charged on loans, as seems probable, students will really feel themselves consumers from the moment they step through that university door. And deans, or module convenors, will have to demand that more teaching staff are provided, to meet the needs of this new generation of students.

Labels: student loans, tuition fees, University Life

Although it has had many casualties, last night I realised at a comedy gig that the recession has been great for comedians, providing a rich vein of material. One comedian joked that in the present crisis, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, looks a bit like the weedy kid at school who wants to be on the cricket team. He is finally handed the bat, whilst every other player scarpers, knowing that the window behind him has just been broken.

I could laugh last night. This time last week, however, was one of the most stressful periods I have been through since I finished my PhD. As I blogged about recently, I've been waiting on the (forever delayed) outcome of a job interview for an academic post. Meanwhile, my partner was about to learn whether she would be made redundant. On Friday, I finally learned I had landed the position, whilst my partner was kept on in her employment. Hence the comedy, when it could so easily have been tears.

For myself and my partner, things have worked out well, but that jest about the kid left holding the cricket bat is one that reaches towards a truth for my generation in general. Whilst people in their 40s and 50s may have made money and good homes on the rising housing ladder and stock markets, the younger generation have been left at the bottom, struggling to climb on the rungs of safe jobs and safe houses. And yet, with the windows now broken in credit crunch, with the world warming and non-renewable resources depleting, it is the young who are expected to fix the broken environmental and financial systems that the baby boomer generation have created.

Perhaps it was with a slight sense of guilt about this that in the United Kingdom New Labour, led by its middle aged, middle England, average Joe (nee Tony), came to power in 1997. New Labour pledged to address the social, income and environmental inequalities that had been generated by Thatcherism. The engineer for this change was an echo: "Education, education, education." Labour promised to get half of school leavers into Higher Education, the reasoning being that better education leads to better paid jobs which in turn leads to a more equable society. Although I was convinced that student loans - which Labour introduced in order to fund the expansion of higher education - would be counter-productive and put the poorest students off from applying to university, and although I worried that with so many gaining degrees employers would be unable to discriminate between good and weaker graduates, at the time I agreed with the principle that university education should not be the privilege of a select few but be open to all.

However, as a recent PhD graduate emerging from my study into the present world crunched by credit and a decade from environmental disaster, I cannot help but wonder whether my generation has not been sold a bit of a pipe dream by its middle-aged leaders. Though I have enjoyed every minute of my university life, is education really going to be the panacea it was promised to be? Are degrees really the best medicine that the young can take to heal the problems created by the older generation? A report from the Higher Education Statistics Agency last week showed that a quarter of graduates are not in full-time employment three years after graduating, whilst one fifth of graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree. As the recession bites, one-in-ten graduates from the class of 2009 will still be jobseeking in six months time. This will be the first group to have paid the full £3000 tuition fees for their education. They will be the most indebted, least employed - but best educated - generation ever.

Last week, my partner and myself got lucky, though we were told that luck should not come into it: get a degree, and that safe job with good income is guaranteed. However, the statistics cited above - one in ten, one in five - tell the story that the lottery is in play for many other, less lucky but talented, graduates.

Yet what has struck me during the stress of my personal life and of the national news is how student life is very isolated from the bigger picture of economics and politics. Like, I suspect, many of the class of 2009 feel, I feel like I have been asleep for the last seven years of academic work, and now the "real world" is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

As a dormant PhD student, although I regularly shouted at the radio news, I always felt somewhat detached from the world of economics and housing markets, which were theoretical spheres in which I did not move. After all, as a graduate researcher I lived off a small income, and was going to have to do so throughout my PhD. It was good to discuss in the pub whether nurses were underpaid or whether inflation was too high; but with a disposable income and overdraft stuck at zero, such discussions were purely abstract, irrelevant to my own life. So long as I could buy bread and milk, and heat my house, I was going to be just fine. The smug chatter about skyrocketing house prices and loft extensions discussed over bottles of Merlot across middle England passed me by. I had no chance of getting a mortgage, so house prices were irrelevant. The pensions time bomb was a bit of a damp squib; I did not even have an income, let alone the ability to divert some of it into a pot for retirement. As a left-winger, I saw income tax as unqualifiedly the best way of redistributing wealth to the poorest in society.

Now, though, as the highlight of my life is to receive a pay slip every month, the world seems a little different, and economic issues start to matter greatly. As a taxpayer, especially one whose partner works with the long-term unemployed, suddenly income tax does not seem quite so perfect an instrument of social change. As I now own a car, inflation hits me every time I pass a petrol pump. Whilst I agreed with the expansion of higher education as a student, as a graduate who chose to continue in education rather than enter work the interest on my student loan has increased by £1500 over the last few years. Last year, I managed to pay off a healthy £6 of interest, let alone any of the capital. Diversifying higher education is a great idea - but do I have to be the one to pay for it?

The economic world matters - and unlike when I was a student, this time it's personal. The comic I saw last night really did sum up the sense of bewilderment I feel. I did not make the world in which mortgages are impossible to obtain. I did not burn the carbon now clotting the atmosphere. And yet I find myself left standing in this sort of world, whilst my parent's generation looks on from behind net curtains in unmortgaged houses, hoping I am going to be able to put their mistakes right.

But my first person "I" may be a false one. I am not alone. I am one of a generation of young, talented graduates who may be in debt and out of work, but which does have an education and skills behind them. I originally wrote this blog post for a website which hosts several thousand committed early-career researchers, studying climate change and stock market behaviour and social justice. So please, fellow graduates of 2009, tell me to stop being so pessimistic. Tell me I'm wrong to feel resentful about the older generation. Tell me we can set things straight. Tell me I'm not holding the cricket bat alone.

[This is a modified cross-post from the Graduate Junction blog.]

Labels: credit crunch, Politics, University Life

Last week, the UK's postgraduate support body, Vitae, published a survey of distance learning and part-time doctorates. The next day in the UK, universities and the higher education press were pouring over the results from the annual National Student Survey, extrapolating a general rule about the state of universities from every dropped percentage point. Meanwhile, as an ongoing feature of this time of the academic year, many postgraduates will be busy filling in questionnaires for their graduate schools.

It sometimes seems as if higher education is fuelled by two things: money, and survey results. But whilst entire university administration departments are dedicated to designing questionnaires, or to dissecting their results, should individual academics or postgraduate teaching assistants seek feedback on their own teaching? In this blog post, I want to share my own experience (or initial lack of it) in designing surveys to direct my own teaching. But before thinking about the methods of questionnaire design, it is worth stressing why feedback is such a vital tool for teaching, even at the early stage of an academic career in which I find myself.

If UK academics want to apply to the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the national centre for teaching excellence, to receive accreditation - often, for early-career researchers, at the Associate level - all they need to do is to fill in a form describing their teaching activities in two "areas of activity" from a list of five. These include assessing students, planning a lesson, or providing a supportive environment in which students can learn.

Area 1, for instance, asks the applicant to:

Identify the ways in which you contribute to the design and planning of learning activities. These might include involvement in the design or redesign of curricula, courses and programmes of study and/or identifying and planning different kinds of interaction with learners in various contexts for single sessions or larger programmes.

Perhaps you have held a tutorial with a group of students, planned a seminar or even given a lecture. Surely all you need to do, then, is to state what you have taught - books you have used, for example - just as you would on a CV?

The catch comes with the subsequent sentence, a mantra that is repeated beneath all of the other areas of activity:

Please give reasons for your choice of learning content, activities and techniques and how they relate to developing the learners' understanding of the subject. Please explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it.

These repeated sentences represent the tip of the huge, foundational move that has taken place in universities over the last two decades. This is the shift towards "student-centred learning."

At first, this might seem like one of those clever-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrases so beloved of technocrats. Surely universities have always had students at their centre? But consider the case of the professor who stands in front of the blackboard in a stuffy lecture theatre, droning on for an hour about some scrawl behind him, to which he occasionally gestures with an absent hand. I am sure you have encountered this stereotype at some point in your education. In response to a lecturer like this, you might well have buried your head in your hands and your eyes in your textbooks, believing that the reason you cannot understand the material or find it so dull is not that the lecturer is bad, but rather than he is so brilliant and the material he is teaching so difficult that you will never understand it. You may even have fallen for that fallacy that the worse the teacher, the better the student you must become, because you are being forced to study independently in order to understand.

Student-centred learning attempts to send such lecturers up in a (metaphorical) puff of smoke, turning attention instead to students. Lecturers should not plan lessons in ways that they find easiest to teach; and although teaching is often most exciting when at the cutting-edge of research, they should not simply talk about their current career-defining, ultra-complex project because that interests them more than teaching the basics. Rather, lecturers should instead consider what hard knowledge and soft skills they want students to learn by the end of their degree, and think about how students might best go about learning it.

This is what lies behind the HEA's application for Associate Practitioners, with that repeated requirement that you "give reasons for your choice of learning content" and that you "explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it."

How, though, can one provide this sort of evidence? The clue lies in compulsory Area 5 of the HEA's application form:

This area is about how you use research, scholarly activity and/or professional activities to support learning. Please use this section to give examples of ways in which you draw upon discipline based and pedagogic research, scholarly activity and/or other professional activities in the support of teaching and learning.

No PhD researcher should ever uncritically accept the findings of the latest journal article. Instead, research requires one to evaluate the previous reliability of an author, or to look out for any cunning argumentative tricks or methodological errors that may compromise a paper's findings. Area 5 asks that researchers bring the same evaluative techniques to bear on teaching. How do we know our teaching is effective for students? How do we evaluate whether they are learning in ways that best suit them?

This is where the questionnaire or survey starts to become of value to individual academics, not just to institutions focused on the latest league tables. Whilst good teachers will always be able to pick up on the vibes of a classroom, and sense whether students are engaged with the material they are teaching, there is no substitute for hard evidence of teaching effectiveness, just as in research one would never reject a paper's findings purely on a hunch.

And so onto my own experience. When I started teaching tutorials in English Literature four years ago, I thought I was doing a great job. Not only did I give students preliminary reading to do, I also got them to download podcasts and audio books. Rather than sticking with dusty books, I asked them to do exercises with hypertext editions.

But whilst I may have enjoyed implementing these twenty-first-century practices, when I set about applying to the HEA in 2006, how could I know that these were actually what students wanted? How could I measure whether my teaching techniques were benefiting their learning? In large part, answering this meant designing a survey. And here, I as a literary academic found myself somewhat in the dark - and, by sharing my experiences here, I hope to enlighten others in the same position as I was three years ago.

The first thing I found is that in order to be useful, questions need to be specific. Asking students whether they enjoyed tutorials (or not) might (or might not) do something for my ego, but reveals little about how they are using tutorials for learning. Perhaps they enjoyed tutorials, for example, because I never scheduled them first thing in the morning. Perhaps they were with their friends in my group, and their memories of tutorials are conditioned more by the chatter before and after, than by what actually went on in the classroom.

Even when I later modified this question to ask whether my tutorials were useful in "developing your understanding of course material," I found this did not really help much. At my university, students receive just four one-hour tutorials per year, the rest of teaching taking the form of lectures. Therefore, in preparing for a one-off tutorial, a student will usually read their primary and secondary material carefully, thereby improving their understanding of the course material automatically. Although they may not have perceived it that way when they responded to my question, the exact form of the tutorial may have mattered less than the mere fact of its existence as a key punctuation point in the academic year. Additionally, whilst I try to allow students to do most of the talking and debate in tutorials, with me taking the role of chairperson, I know that other tutors prefer to take a more active role, disseminating ideas and information rather than merely facilitating a debate. Neither approach may be better at ensuring that the preparation for the tutorial, and the contact time itself, become sound platforms for subsequent study. If a student acknowledged that my tutorials had helped their understanding, this did not necessarily mean my way of running tutorials was the best or only way of achieving the same result.

The first recommendation with surveys, then, is to try avoid generalised questions, or to ask them as part of a suite of more detailed ones. Asking whether a student enjoyed or benefited from my tutorials told me little about my teaching. Neither did asking whether it helped their understanding, because a different approach might have been similarly beneficial. In the most recent version of the survey I issued last academic year, I still asked these questions, as they provide an opportunity for students to complain if they really have not enjoyed the tutorials, and for me to get a general sense of student perceptions of me generally (it is not necessarily the case that just because a student may offer lots of valid pointers for improvement, this means your teaching overall is poor). However, I also ask more detailed, follow-up questions. Did students feel they got more out of set tasks (mini-exercises I get them to do in pairs), or when discussing a text as a whole group? Did students use any handouts given in tutorials as a way of pursuing themes developed in the space of the hour's discussion?

I also now ask very specific questions looking ahead to teaching in subsequent years, whilst reflecting on the one just gone. For example, I ask whether students benefited from any online resources or podcasts, and if so whether they think the next generation of students would appreciate more of them. This year, I even asked whether my current students thought future ones would be happy for me to use Facebook in teaching. Their responses to these questions were clear enough to guide my teaching next year decisively. Broadly put, yes to more online resources and podcasts, but no way can I use Facebook for teaching, breaking the boundary between academic teacher and student socialite.

Another trick I have discovered with surveys is to introduce them at the start of the year rather than towards the end. This might seem counter-intuitive, and against the way surveys usually run at universities. How can students comment on a course when they have not yet completed it? However, I realised that presenting the questionnaire at the start of the year would have two benefits.

Firstly, when I hand out the questionnaires at our first meeting, it forms a sort of contract between student and teacher. By indicating that I value their pedagogic feedback and will try act upon it, this implies that I will also value any literary comments they might make in tutorials. I may be the "teacher," but that does not make me God, and giving them the opportunity to criticise my teaching also illustrates the point that my ideas about a text should not be viewed as the "right" answers. This is critical in English literature, which is a discursive rather than fact-based subject.

Secondly, one of the well-recognised problems with questionnaires is that they tend to represent polarised opinions. Either students who have hated a course use them to sound off all their grumbles, even if they do not originate with you, or students who have loved the course praise the teacher, even if it is really the selection of books or material that they have liked. In previous years, I have experienced both sides of the equation in my survey results. What can be missing is the intermediate students who have liked some aspects but not others. It is hard to make concrete changes in response either to total demolition or praise, whereas students with balanced views can be more specific about what was good or bad about your teaching.

Therefore, issuing a questionnaire at the start of the year helps to encourage comments on individual aspects of teaching that can be enhanced as the year progresses, rather than coming to light only retrospectively, in a sweeping appraisal at the end. Last year, for example, after one tutorial a student commented that the questions about a novel which I asked in preparation for that tutorial did not really align with the essay questions asked in the exam at the end of the year. A fair point, and one I could rectify straight away in later teaching.

A final move I made this year, to hone the process I had started when applying to the HEA three years ago, was to place the questionnaires online. Though the paper versions never asked a student to put their names on the top, the online environment ensures greater anonymity for students, which is crucial if they are going to offer free judgements. Additionally, I noticed with the paper versions that many respondents simply offered numerical answers (that is, rating for specific questions from 1, good, to 5, bad) rather than giving more useful, written feedback. I guess this is because they felt that they had to answer every question on the written sheet, and so simply dashed through it. In contrast, the online questionnaires often received detailed comments about just one or two aspects - perhaps in response to a particular issue with one tutorial - rather than purely quantitative ratings across the full spread of questions.

I cannot stress enough how beneficial surveys have been for my teaching. Whether it is doing the specific, simple things (such as using more podcasts or keeping well away from Facebook), confirming my intuitions about how much a group is getting from my teaching, assuaging my ego with positive comments or keeping me on my toes with negative ones, questionnaires force me continually into that position desired by the HEA, where teaching is never statically delivered from the front of a lecture hall, but part of a reciprocal process which sees the student as the key figure in learning.

Given this, I do find it odd that although my own department have been supportive in allowing me to produce my own surveys, I know other postgraduates have had different experiences, because of fears of negative criticism which might lead students, who are after all fee paying clients, to complain formally to their universities, once they realise enough of them feel the same way about poor teaching at their institution. I am also aware that, over four years, my questionnaires have evolved tortuously out of my earlier naivete. I have eventually, I hope, found a good way to ask that all-important, daring question of a student: how effective is my teaching?

[This is a slightly modified cross-post from the Graduate Junction blog.]

Labels: Higher Education Academy, questionnaire, surveys, teaching, University Life

On 2nd August, the UK's Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee reported on Students and Universities. Among discussion about access, tuition fees, and the role of further education colleges, the main headline here is about the assurance of the standards of degrees across universities. The committee reports that:

the current system for safeguarding standards is out of date, inconsistent and should be replaced. The Quality Assurance Agency should be transformed into an independent Quality and Standards Agency with a specific standards remit.

The Committee also says that the culture at the top of the sector should change. The Committee found defensive complacency in the leadership of the sector and no appetite to explore key issues such as the reasons for the proportional increase in first and upper second class honours degrees in the past 15 years.

It is unacceptable to the Committee that Vice-Chancellors could not give a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether first class honours degrees achieved at different universities indicate the same or different intellectual standards.

This has been a perennial problem. How do universities retain their independence to teach innovative, distinctive courses, whilst ensuring that a student at one university has to work just as hard to achieve the same degree result as a student from another?

It is clearly important for employers to know that candidates are graduating with equivalent degrees. An employer needs to compare individuals on a like-for-like basis, whereas the system as it stands might allow a candidate from a university that is generous in awarding results to attain a 2:1 when at a different institution he or she might have been awarded a 2:2. Alternatively, given that employers cannot know the demands of every course at every university, although one hopes the old boy's club has long since closed for business, it might be tempting for an employer to perceive a candidate with a lesser degree from a well-known, red-brick university as being better than a candidate with a higher degree from a comparatively anonymous former polytechnic.

As things stand, without national standards across universities, it is ironic that whilst universities - quite legitimately - complain about grade inflation at A-level which makes it impossible to distinguish between applicants all predicted top marks, degree inflation is rife at universities themselves. One of the key markers on league tables is employability, and one of the key determinants of employability is the quality of degree a jobseeker leaves with. It is not surprising, then, that the committee noted that whilst 53% of students achieved a first or 2:1 in 1997, that had risen to 61% by 2008.

Standardisation only exacerbates, rather than alleviating the problem of inflation, however, as I experienced at first hand when I graduated in 2003. Look at the degree results in my subject, English Literature, from my undergraduate institution:

Year	1st	2:1	2:2
2000	12.0	79.5	8.4
2001	15.4	76.9	7.7
2002	13.8	75.5	10.6
2003	23.4	75.8	0.8
2004	22.75	74.68	2.58
2005	20.93	77.33	1.74
2006	27.98	69.72	2.29
2007	25.75	72.91	1.34
2008	33.76	65.4	0.84

Now as an English literature academic mathematics may be my weak point, but something clearly happened in 2003, the year I graduated. I remember that nervous day when we gathered around to look at the results on the board, and were stunned to see a quarter of the results from the class of 2003 were Firsts. Certainly it took something of the shine off my own (and, indeed, with hindsight, I am not at all sure I merited one). Suddenly, compared to previous years, an additional ten percent of us were now getting Firsts who could have been expected to get 2:1s in previous years.

It is certainly not that our exams were easier than those sat by previous years, and unlikely that our class (or those subsequently) suddenly became better at reading books. Unlike A-Levels, where exams have undoubtedly become less rigorous, exams in English at universities tend to ask certain questions about certain texts and authors, and to keep asking them in the same way year after year. If something had happened to our year in 2003, it was stemming from statisticians, not literature students or academics.

I have since gathered that the reason for this effect was standardisation. It was reasoned that since my university department demanded its entrants have 3 As at A-Level, and since university degrees are supposedly of the same standard across institutions, there should be more, better quality candidates emerging with the really top degrees than at institutions taking in a lower calibre of student from A-Level. As computer programmers say: garbage-in, garbage-out.

The risk with the standardisation of degrees across different universities, though, is that it denigrates the effect universities can have in changing the ambitions and skills of their students. Ideally, universities are democratic places, where students are accepted based on their intellectual qualities rather than their social or economic backgrounds, and which subsequently promote bright graduates into higher paid jobs, whatever their class of birth. This is why, as New Labour has failed to decrease child poverty or the gap between rich and poor, they have turned to universities as the engines of egalitarianism. However, since the system is currently biased such that students from private schools go to the best universities (because, in a broken A-Level system, students cannot be compared on intellectual merit), standardisation ensures that this effect will be exacerbated later, as those same privileged students are more likely to emerge with the top degrees.

However, to translate across an argument made in relation to university entrance criteria, it may be that a student with worse A-level results, going to a weaker university, has to work harder to attain a 2:1 than a student at a better university. For example, the top universities might well have more individual tuition, better library facilities, increased levels of pastoral and financial support. The student who has struggled through a university with none of these things may have to try harder than a student who breezes through on the back of them. Universities are not just about the gaining of knowledge for specific workplaces. A university course in biochemistry or English is a horribly inefficient way of enabling a student to enter a graduate programme with a bank or consultancy, as many do. But graduate employers know that universities matter primarily not for the pure knowledge they transmit, but for the techniques and transferable skills students acquire in its pursuit: how to evaluate and acquire different sources of information, how to work independently, how to juggle work and life, how to evaluate problems and pioneer solutions. A student who has attained a degree from a university which offers minimal contact hours, or has a limited library, may well acquire as many of these skills as a student from a well resourced institution. Saying that the former should be more likely to get a worse degree than the latter simply because they are entering with lesser qualifications diminishes the valuable work all universities do by nature, changing the capacities of the students who pass through them.

It is entirely understandable that employers need some simple measure by which to evaluate a student's rounded abilities, to allow them to understand how a university's standing might have affected the sort of education they have received. Is a student with a 2:1 from an established university really better than a student with a 2:1 from a less well-known one? Is a student with a First from my university really among an elite few nationally, or have they been awarded that top class on the back of the university's national ranking? The answer to these questions is not simply to boost the degree classes of those at the top who take the brightest students, and to cut those at the bottom. The degree classification system, with its narrow banding, is simply not fit for this purpose, for if the logic of standardisation continues on its trend since I graduated, within 50 years we would expect all students at my university to get Firsts, and presumably all students somewhere else to get Thirds. The government's plans to change the degree system as recommended by the Burgess Report, though iconoclastic to an ancient system, cannot come soon enough.

At a course level, too, standardisation becomes an impossible beast with which to wrestle. Is it more or less challenging, for example, for a literature student to specialise in modules in contemporary fiction than in the Romantic poets? Does a student who studies poetry (poetry being an endangered species at some universities) undertake an easier literature degree than a student who wrestles with longer novels (which seem in some departments to be the sole literary genre)? Is a university that only offers modules in literature requiring its students to carry out a more rigorous course than universities that allow students to think also about film adaptations of literary texts?

I do not think there can or should be any definitive answers to these comparisons. The risk of degree standardisation is that courses too may become uniform across the sector, preventing a student from participating in a culture of research that is reflected in the unique modules taught by enthusiastic lecturers. Universities exist not just to give students a degree at the end, but to allow students to immerse themselves in a subject - or elements of a subject - that they enjoy for an extended period of time, taking with them the intellectual grounding that lasts a lifetime. Even if we could quantitatively measure whether studying the novel was "harder" than studying poetry, or if one university demands more of its students than another, degree results ought to indicate the quality of a student, not a university. A student, at any university, should only attain a First if they have fully engaged with their subject, regardless of how that university or student's entrance qualifications stands compared to others. There are no such things as standard students. There ought not to be such things as standardised degrees.

Labels: degree classifications, Innovation University Sciences and Skills committee, Quality Assurance Agency, University Life