Examination of Witnesses (Questions 144
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 12 APRIL 2000
DR ROGER
BROWN AND
PROFESSOR ROBIN
MIDDLEHURST
Chairman
144. Can I welcome Dr Brown and Professor Robin
Middlehurst to our deliberations and thank you both for writing
in and sending some excellent material, and for agreeing to come
and give evidence to the Committee. Whilst this is a formal committee,
I always say that we try to bear on informality and I soon lapse
into first names rather than anything more formal. I would really
ask you to introduce yourselves and say one or two words about
why you put your evidence into us.
(Dr Brown) I am currently the principal
of Southampton Institute, the largest higher education college
in the country, but my interest in the matters you have in front
of you, chairman, is not merely about the current situation affecting
Southampton Institute. I was formerly chief executive of the Higher
Education Quality Council which was for four years the UK national
quality assurance agency and I have continued to write and to
study matters relating to quality assurance. The matters which
I wish to put before you this morning really concern the congruence
of the new quality framework with other government policies and
other ways in which the higher education system may evolve and
develop.
(Professor Middlehurst) I am based at the University
of Surrey. I am director of the Centre for Continuing Education
in a school of education studies at the university there but my
reason for being here is because I was director of the quality
enhancement group at the Higher Education Quality Council working
with Roger Brown and my evidence is related to quality enhancement
issues.
145. And you have just produced a very interesting
report on one aspect of higher education?
(Professor Middlehurst) Yes. I was commissioned by
the CVCP, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, to
undertake a study of the business of borderless education and
the implications for UK higher education and various policy issues.
Helen Jones
146. We were talking earlier in committee about
the need to focus on the quality of the students' experience and
with that in mind I want to direct your attention a little to
teaching quality in higher education. I wonder if you could give
us your views on how you think the quality of teaching varies
between different disciplines and different types of institution
and also perhaps about the skills you think are necessary for
teachers in higher education and how they vary, bearing in mind,
for instance, that the structure of an undergraduate degree in
English is quite different from one in physics, to pluck an example
at random. What is the quality and how variable is it in your
experience?
(Dr Brown) You have asked some very wide-ranging questions
there. I will try and give you a brief answer and then will use
it to pad what I have to say. First of all, I think there has
to be variability between disciplines and between institutions.
There has to be variability between disciplines, not least because
the disciplines themselves vary and what is regarded as effective
teaching and learning in one discipline may not be regarded as
effective teaching and learning in another. One can think of lots
of examples of that, and one finds that even in one's own institution.
One will also find variations between institutions in terms of
the approach which the institution itself has to teaching, the
priority which it gives to teaching, the relationship between
research and teaching in a particular discipline, so there are
bound to be variabilities of that kind—and I would describe
those, if you like, as horizontal variabilities. But you may also
have in mind what one might call vertical variabilities—ie,
is the teaching in one discipline better than teaching in another
discipline or teaching in one institution better than in another?
On the first of those, it is very difficult to calibrate the quality
of teaching in one discipline as compared with another, for the
sorts of reasons I have mentioned. There will be variations in
teaching quality between institutions; some of those will have
to do with resources; some of those will have to do with the priority
which those concerned give to teaching and learning; some of those
will be concerned with the weight in which the quality of that
teaching is evaluated and developed, and there are undoubtedly
variations. Whether they are wide or great, we genuinely do not
know. If you look at the scores from teaching quality assessment,
for example, there are variations obviously which assessors have
found in the quality of teaching; whether those are wide it would
be very difficult to say because those are not norm referenced;
they should refer to the aims and objectives the institution itself
has. So that is difficult to say. May I come on to your second
question, the question of the skills necessary. There has been
a big debate within higher education as to whether teaching in
higher education is basically sui generis and does not require
any other preparation, subject knowledge, and disciplinary expertise
or whether it requires generic teaching competencies. The thinking
in the sector is towards the view that some basic competencies
are required and the Institute for Learning and Teaching, of which
I am a vice chair, is beginning to evaluate and enumerate those.
What has yet to be determined is what actually it is that distinguishes
teaching in higher education from teaching in other areas of education
but certainly one view is that in higher education it is the involvement
with the development of the discipline and the fact that one is
dealing with areas at the fringes of knowledge in that discipline
which distinguishes teaching in higher education from other areas
of teaching. But that is not a uniform or uncontested view.
Mr Foster
147. You mentioned having in effect professional
teaching qualifications for teaching staff. What advantages would
you think that would bring to the student experience?
(Dr Brown) First of all, I think it would help to
ensure what one might call a threshold standard of quality, if
you like. My personal view is that the quality of teaching across
the sector does remain patchy and that there are many examples
of good practice but also some examples of bad. If a professional
qualification could be established which really captured teachers'
interest and imagination, unless it was obviously imposed upon
them, then it would help to ensure thresholds standard of quality.
The other thing which it might do is to enable teaching to have
the same status and esteem within institutions that research has.
I am sure the committee will be aware of the fact that there is
a great deal of evidence that, in many institutions, teaching
and similar activities does not have the same status or rewards
as research.
Chairman
148. The excellent article that you enclosed
in your submission from Alan Jenkins poses some very fundamental
questions about what that teaching should comprise and what the
border is between teaching and research. I found it both stimulating
and disturbing because, quite honestly, if you take the implications
of the research seriously, we are talking about totally changing
the way in which we look at the learning experience.
(Dr Brown) Absolutely.
149. So that means a professional qualification
if there was one from a university would have to be centred around
something like this, would it not?
(Dr Brown) It would indeed and built upon something
which is beginning to be called the scholarship of teaching and
the essence of that is teachers bring to their professional practices
the same attributes of scholarly behaviour that they bring to
their research and that is essentially what I think needs to be
achieved. The difficulty is that the way in which the teaching
qualification has been approached up till now has been seen in
terms of competence-based qualifications, and those are not uncontested
within higher education. One needs to find a way of identifying
and engaging teachers on the basis of their disciplinary knowledge
and the extension of that which then feeds back into their teaching.
The shorthand term for that which I have been using is the "scholarship
of teaching".
150. Could you just take us briefly through
what happens at the moment because members of this committee may
not know, for someone who becomes a university lecturer or teacher,
how much preparation does that person have in a teaching role
as opposed to perhaps just having obtained a PhD or done some
part time in tutorials? What teaching is there?
(Dr Brown) It is a requirement in my institution that
anyone who is a teacher in my institution has to have a teaching
qualification in higher education, and we have two courses for
newly-appointed staff who have to pass that within two years as
part of their probation before they can be established at the
institute. But my institution is in a minority. The great majority
do not have schemes of that kind—they are beginning to come
in—which is not to say that institutions in many cases do
not find ways of preparing staff for their teaching positions,
but you need to bear in mind that much teaching in British higher
education is not done either by professional lecturers or teachers
but by research assistants, research fellows and people of that
kind and this is one reason why the quality of teaching is somewhat
variable.
Helen Jones
151. I think we wanted to focus on student experience
because while we accept the primacy of research, for a student
their experience of a higher education institution is determined
by the quality of the teaching they get. Can you tell us why there
is such a debate in the academic world about whether or not you
need some basic competencies in teaching because, frankly, I find
this very difficult to understand? In any other discipline we
would expect people to be basically competent at what they do.
We are, after all, charging students fees. What is the resistance
to this?
(Professor Middlehurst) The resistance, such as it
is—and it is not everywhere—is that higher education
originally was about teaching a subject and so the subject knowledge
has been the primary focus for the teaching built on research
expertise. So that is the starting point but in most institutions—I
would disagree slightly with Roger there—there has been
tremendous pressure to ensure that teachers are competent at the
beginning so that takes place in some cases at interview, followed
by short courses to ensure basic competence and then more and
more the longer certificate courses to ensure competence in teaching.
If I may make a supplementary remark, something I think that is
very pertinent to the student experience and to teaching skills
is that the way higher education will shift in the future in terms
of on-line teaching, preparation of materials, means the way in
which we typically think of teaching now needs to fundamentally
change and the requirement for staff development and retraining
will be very considerable.
Mr Marsden
152. On that, that is in the future. The fact
of the matter is, at the moment, if you do a PhD on the reign
of Henry III and you get appointed into a university as a result,
it is then assumed you are competent to teach about medieval Britain
to a class of people who know nothing about it. Is that not the
case?
(Professor Middlehurst) It is less the case than it
used to be because of the effort to ensure that, at probation,
people are getting some basic training and, as I say, the move
is towards with the ILT competence qualifications for teaching.
Charlotte Atkins
153. Following up on your on-line learning aspects,
how do you think that is going to affect the learning experience
in the future? Clearly increasingly, not only in higher education
but other education as well, we are relying on on-line types of
learning, distance learning, people going part time, all those
sorts of aspects. What is your view about how that will impact
on the quality of experience for the student?
(Professor Middlehurst) There has been some recent
research in Canada about "no noticeable difference",
as it is called, between face-to-face teaching experiences and
on-line teaching experiences in terms of outcomes and the standards
achieved at the end. Clearly the actual process of teaching is
very different. However, I think we have to be careful about the
nature of the students that we are expecting to engage in that
and frankly, at the moment, there is not sufficient research evidence
to be able to answer the question very clearly about how different
the experience will be for different groups of students and what
kind of prerequisites one might expect from either the students
or that the institutions will have to provide in terms of foundation
training to engage in that kind of on-line learning.
154. Obviously you have institutions like Harvard
which come up with their MBAs which, at a cost, you can effectively
buy and that involves a whole range of different learning experiences.
How valid they are, I do not know, and whether the experience
of a student and the impact on the student would be different
if it was done in Harvard as opposed to an institution over here
and still ending up with the same degree, I do not know. Clearly,
the two experiences are very different. What is your view about
the quality of the qualification that they have at the end of
the day?
(Dr Brown) Can I say, first of all, there are very
few purely on-line qualifications and I think there always will
be relatively few purely on-line qualifications. Secondly, my
view is that, at least in principle, and Robin said we do not
have much research evidence but what we do have suggests that
the student experience could well be enhanced by the judicious
and proper use of on-line provision. For example, you can see
or contact your tutor all the time—
155. At least a virtual one anyway, that must
be an advantage!
(Dr Brown)—Indeed, so there are ways in which
you can enhance the student experience. The real difficulty is
that it will pose very considerable challenges for people designing
and delivering qualifications. Coming back to the earlier questioning
about the competence of people involved, if people are not already
strong pedagogically and do not have an adequate infrastructure
and knowledge of how to deliver courses, then they will struggle
even more with on-line delivery than with conventional methods
and, therefore, great caution needs to be exercised in going down
that route. I do not think there is any reason in principle why
the quality of experience of student going through an on-line
course need be any inferior to one which involves more face-to-face
contact—and it could be much better.
156. Is part of the student experience not interaction
with other students and learning from that? Certainly in the days
when I did my degree, the involvement with other students was
an important part of the experience, certainly of the learning
experience interacting with other students and of course on-line,
depending on what percentage of your course work is on-line, tends
to be a very personal interaction between the screen and the individual
student.
(Dr Brown) May I just say that I think you are over-looking
two things. First of all, the amount of face-to-face contact in
higher education anyway is now much less than it ever was and
getting less and less. Students are increasingly taught in large
groups; staff are under more pressure; tutorials are suffering,
etc. Secondly, there are some students who do not necessarily
want that face-to-face contact—early learners, people working
at home, people working part time, those kind of people. Thirdly,
you can get quite a lot of contact. You can have virtual fora,
virtual seminars—all you do not have is the kind of face-to-face
discussion you and I are having.
Valerie Davey
157. I was going to remind us of the quality
we have here—two tutors and seven members and that is great.
I am interested that we are in parallel with this inquiry looking
at early years where, increasingly, those youngsters are being
helped to ask the right questions. So in other words, even at
the earliest stage, we are now into an education, as we have in
the past, where it is learning on both sides at a very early age.
So supremely here students are offering as well as receiving—they
are not hands to be filled; they are young people, older people,
mature people, at variance now in the student population and I
think you are touching on the fact that, provided there was an
overall understanding of that process for students, it could have
a lecture room of one hundred within the course as well as the
elements that we are now experiencing today. Is anyone looking
at that overview of the total quality of the student experience
throughout their course os opposed to just looking in on perhaps
the teaching qualifications of one lecturer?
(Professor Middlehurst) The academic review process
and the new academic review framework and the previous teaching
quality assessment framework looked at the quality of learning
support but I think not at the whole educational experience you
are talking about. Indeed, going back to the very first question,
the experience and the needs of different students and different
subjects would come into play if you wanted to do that. There
is a big range; my continuing education unit, for example, teaches
undergraduates but they are all probably over 30 and their requirements—mothers
at home, retired people, people at work—are very different
and the expectations they would have about employability and others
things are not the same as 18-year-old undergraduates. You would
not expect the teaching experience to be the same either.
Chairman
158. I want us to move on but I do not think
we can leave this without pressing you on this. Are you saying,
Dr Brown, that it really does not matter how much face-to-face
contact a student has when they are taking a university course;
that there is research base that shows that you can just as well
take a degree never meeting a tutor and never having a tutorial,
but do it all on-line and still get the same quality result?
(Dr Brown) No, I am not saying that and I do not think
the evidence base yet exists to enable one to be as dogmatic as
you have been construing my remarks to be.
159. I am just trying to tease out the implications.
(Dr Brown) What I think I am saying is that for most
students, today anyway, the amount of face-to-face contact in
a course is limited, for various reasons. What one needs, in my
view, is a package, a menu, a range of options, as it were, which
will be geared to the kind of student that Robin has been describing,
the subject area, the level at which the student is studying and
what the people designing the course think is the best range of
pedagogical methods for that particular student at that particular
time. I am sure face-to-face education will always have a part
to play and I would certainly see it as being a necessary part
of any course. What I think I am saying is one cannot be a priori
about the proportion it would consist of. It has to be part of
a range of ways in which the student develops their learning.
For example, you may need certain techniques for students at lower
levels and certain techniques at higher levels. I suppose really
all I am saying is we can get very carried away by the on-line
possibilities. I think they are potentially rather rich but one
is still going to be fairly eclectic in the range of learning
methodologies that are going to be applied.
|
