INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
CONFERENCE PAPER:
Funding partners: ESRC and HEQC for phase one, 1/9/97 - 31/8/98;
ESRC, HEFCE and DfEE for phase two, 1/10/98 - 30/9/99
Award references L123251071 and L123251074
Extracts from a short talk given to the Higher Education Quality and Employability Division (DfEE) conference on 'Educational Change Within Higher Education' held at the CVCP Offices, Tavistock Square, London
2 December 1998Andrew Hannan, University of Plymouth
Educational change in HE is driven by a number of forces, eg the demands of employers, government policy initiatives, attempts by 'teachers' in HE to meet the changing needs of students and to reflect the changing nature of their subject matter, etc. But inertia, or resistance to change, is also heavily supported by a range of factors, eg for certain institutions the nature of their intake has remained more or less constant, the demands of employers fairly distant and the temptations of government advocated reforms generally resistible, despite the necessity of some token effort. For many 'academics', a term which they would much prefer to 'teachers', their subject remains paramount and their expertise is measured by their research output rather than the quality of learning experienced by their students.
The HE sector is, of course, highly differentiated, with the obvious divide between 'new' and 'old' universities, well illustrated by the league table of RAE performance, with a fairly neat division between them in terms of quality ratings at about the half way point. However, there are also divisions within institutions and even within departments. Even in the most research-oriented of old universities there are lecturers who see themselves primarily as having a teaching role and in the most progressive of new universities, aiming at becoming student-centred learning centres, there are those who lust after international levels of research excellence.
In our traditional higher education system there has always been some room for individuals to innovate in what they teach and how they teach it. On occasion both 'academics' and 'teachers' have experimented with new modes of delivery or more interactive methods of learning. Individual innovation has sometimes benefited from a lack of institutional attention to such matters, but any gains from this have been haphazard and isolated. Even when sources of funding for innovation such as EHE have encouraged such innovators to come out of the closet, their exposure has often been short lived, with good ideas not being taken up elsewhere in the institution and often their own schemes being shelved once other priorities re-assert themselves when the external funding has come to an end.
Major institutionally driven initiatives, such as semesterisation and modularisation, have made an impact in most, but not all universities. The drive towards segmented curricula has been to some extent tempered by the new enthusiasm for generic skills, or 'key graduate attributes' which supposedly transcend subject boundaries. What Bernstein would call a 'collection code' with strong boundaries between contents has occasionally coincided with weak 'frames' where the relationship between teacher and taught, learner and subject matter is more fluid, as represented in work-based projects, group presentations and collaborative learning of various kinds. The tendency towards the standardisation of outcomes in some institutions has led to centralised core skills provision amidst the proliferation of module choice.
Individual innovators have been encouraged by some institutions, discouraged or ignored by others. The 'guided' innovation of the kind sponsored by EHE was often reinvented in its application by innovators who had different sorts of agendas from those who set up the programmes. Increasingly, though, it seems that we are moving towards 'directed' innovation, where institutions are driven by the need to maximise the returns from their investment in information and communications technology, to compete with other providers for an increasingly discerning customer aware of the individual costs of tuition, with a tendency towards a more standardised curriculum and the possibility of a more individualised pedagogy (if the advocates of ICT and CMC are to be believed).
In the struggle for change, willing enthusiasts are, of course, preferable to reluctant conscripts. The biggest problem confronting universities at the moment is convincing their teaching staff that the new methods actually enhance students' learning, particularly the kinds of learning which are held to be important within the various academic subjects. If this is not achieved, the chances of success are very much diminished.
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