Author: Celia Popovic
- Innovation is good and there is no need to find out what others have already done
- Some instructors confuse something that is new for them as being new for everyone else. We now have a wide body of knowledge in SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). It behooves us all to be acquainted with the literature before we assume that our discovery is indeed new. Being new is not of itself aligned with being effective.
- X is a universal panacea
- Nothing is a panacea for everything. In the past VLEs (Virtual Learning Environment) Second Life, MOOCs have variously been touted as the answer to all pedagogic problems. In the long run few innovations live up to the initial hype.
- 'Excellence' is appropriate as a measure or a label
- In recent years the term ‘Excellence’ has been used with such frequency that it has become synonymous with ‘adequate’. Teaching awards are given for teaching excellence, centres of expertise are called centres of excellence, and teaching standards are considered inadequate if they fall below the level of ‘excellent.’ Yet by definition something can only be excellent if it is better than the rest. We cannot all be considered excellent. Many educational developers (and others) believe that the use of the term is not helpful. It would be better to focus on achieving levels of expertise or facility in an area than constantly striving for and claiming excellence.
- The student experience/engagement
- Those who object to the use of this term, or at least question it point to the loss of agency on the part of the student when this is the prevailing paradigm. The locos of control moves from the student to live his or her life to the individual instructor or institution to provide an all round experience.
- For others, the concern is that this is a euphemism that needs to be challenged, as it can be used as a blanket term that is accepted unchallenged. What do we mean when we say ‘the student experience’ or ‘student engagement’?
- Employability is conveyed through a university education
- In the UK ‘employability’ refers to the skills, knowledge and attitudes valued by employers in recent graduates. In the past the professor’s role was to assist a student to gain a rounded knowledge of the subject area. In the last twenty years, or so, this has moved from a focus on a discipline to the ability of a degree to confer access to high paying jobs. Since funding has been tied to the level of employability of graduates from institutions or programs this has led to a focus on what those skills might be and how to help students acquire them.
- In North America this is more often referred to as ‘Experiential Education’, where students are encouraged to apply their learning in working or community contexts, thus by implication enabling them to hone and evidence the skills they will need to land a good job.
- Those who object to this approach argue that employability is not something that can or should be taught in university course.
- Constant review and inspection improves standards
- We tend to measure that which is measurable. For example, it is easier to count the number of students in a class than to evaluate the likelihood that they will apply the lessons from the class in a future situation. If rewards or penalties are tied into the measurement, we are likely to alter our behaviour to improve our scores. This, some would argue, is what happens when a system of quality assurance is applied in an unsympathetic way.
- The perspective of what is reasonable and what is not can vary according to experience. For some, the quality assurance measures in one educational jurisdiction may seem extreme, while for others they seem reasonable. Conversely the lack of measures in another jurisdiction may allow for academic freedom and inter institutional diversity, but for others may lead to a context that appears to be random and chaotic.
- Student Evaluation of Teaching is effective
- In North America student evaluations of teaching are frequently used as a way to determine teaching effectiveness. Where tenure is still offered, an academic’s performance is evaluated for their research, service and teaching. While the first two can be assessed in a qualitative sense (how many publications, what is the impact factor, how many committee hours served, etc) teaching is harder to assess. In North America it is also common for an instructor to have carte Blanche over the way they teach their courses. Team teaching is not common. Student evaluations are therefore directly related to the experience provided by the instructor. In the UK teaching is more likely to be a team effort, student evaluations are not used to rate an individual instructor and consequently have far less emotional impact than in North America.
- The problem with student evaluations has been widely reported: students often show bias in their evaluations. This is of such concern that in 2019 Ryerson University in Toronto stopped using student evaluations as a basis for tenure and promotion decisions.
- Here are some conflicting articles from the press
- The Chronicle of Higher Education The next lawsuits to hit higher education
- Inside Higher Ed: Teaching Evals: Bias and Tenure
- Forbes Magazine Student evaluations of teaching are biased against women? The evidence is far from clear
- Best Practice
- Is ther such a thing as a “best practice”. There are Better Practices; things that improve on what we are currently doing, but there are no Best Practices.Best Practice is an absolute term. This is The Best thing you can do, no argument, regardless of content, just The Best. Do it and you will succeed
- Better practice is relative and contextual. Better than what? Better specifically on what criteria? Better in what circumstances? Better for who? That takes working out, testing evaluating. No one approach will work with everyone: variety in means of engagement, processing and representing learning important.
- Better to be a specialist than a generalist - 10,000 hour study vs The Sports Gene
- Malcolm Gladwell Outliers, study in successful people. Argued that anyone could become a master in a field if they put in the right amount of appropriate practice, He cites 10,000 hours as the average needed for mastery. David Epstein countered in his books The Sports Gene and Range that some people are genetically more likely to succeed than others.
- See Gladwell and Epstein in conversation
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