Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160 - 179)

WEDNESDAY 12 APRIL 2000

DR ROGER BROWN AND PROFESSOR ROBIN MIDDLEHURST

  160. But on the one hand are we suggesting in higher education these packages with more emphasis on a non face-to-face content? Are they, because of the pressures of a mass higher education system because it is cheaper, basically, not to have a human being in a face-to-face relationship, or is it that we are pursuing these because they provide a better education?
  (Dr Brown) It is a mixture but may I pick you up on the cheaper point? Such studies as have been done on on-line provision, and there was a study conducted in Illinois quite recently, did not find it any cheaper.

  161. That is a good answer, thank you. Professor Middlehurst?
  (Professor Middlehurst) Our evidence also in the report that I referred to earlier was that it is definitely not cheaper though, and we urge caution on this, we have to be careful about passing the costs on to the students—the costs for the equipment for example, the materials and so on. At the moment the design of on-line courses is extremely expensive and then there is the infrastructure that is required both for design and delivery and ongoing updating and on-going support for the students, so there is no evidence, I do not think, either from industry that uses on-line training, or from education that are getting into that—except for industry when you are bringing the people from one country to another, for example. So it may be cheaper to have on-line education in-country, which may have an impact on our overseas students.

Charlotte Atkins

  162. Are you saying the initial costs are more expensive? Surely over time those costs will go down. Clearly the initial costs of setting up a course on line of all the equipment and all the new technology and every institution to do their own must be expensive but presumably universities and colleges are doing it because in the long term they expect it to be cheaper.
  (Professor Middlehurst) There is considerable debate because it points in two directions. It is cheaper if you can get mass markets—perhaps—but very big markets and then you are in competition with other countries for that. On the other hand, the customisation and the speed at which knowledge changes actually puts pressure on to continuously update which is expensive.

Chairman

  163. This is fascinating. What you are saying in a sense is what we have seen where mass education has progressed very fast. In the United States, for example, one did see cheap options being introduced like post-graduates teaching rather than qualified academic staff and using tests that can be marked by computer in the first and second year of American university students. So in mass education there is a thrust, is there not, to cheapen because of the numbers and the problems of financial resource. But you are saying with IT you do not think this is part of that; you think it is part of a diverse and different quality of education?
  (Professor Middlehurst) I think that the expectation is that it will lead to cheapness. The evidence as it stands at the moment is that that is not the case. Over time, as the technology gets cheaper, perhaps as the design of courses gets cheaper, one could envisage, for example, that a lot of changes to courses can be done on an on-going basis, for example, but at the moment where you have a kind of mass production function, such as the open university has, the cost of a whole degree course on-line is in the order of 1-2 million pounds.

Dr Harris

  164. I am not surprised by that answer—that it is not necessarily cheaper. I remember from my own experience getting nurses to do things that doctors did was actually better but more expensive and I suppose one might argue that the best way of getting cheap education is to pack more people into a lecture hall. In that sort of traditional education model, lectures and tutorials, is there a danger in your view that a continued expansion, particularly at a lower unit of funding of expansion, can impact on the quality and has impacted on the quality of teaching and, of course, the learning experience?
  (Dr Brown) I would say it has but I would say it is very difficult to find firm evidence to that effect. You were asking quite rightly about the student experience. What has had the most impact in my view about the student experience is that increasingly students nowadays are working. The student genuinely full time is almost an endangered species. Most of my students are working in the bars and clubs of Southampton. That has an inevitable impact on, for example, the ability to return assignments on time, the ability to find time to see tutors and things like that. I do not want to over-state it because I worked in my holidays when I was at university but the pressure students are under now, having to earn money to keep themselves going, many of them having family commitments and things of that kind, impacts upon the ability of students to take advantage of the opportunities that universities and colleges offer.

Charlotte Atkins

  165. Is it making them poorer students as a result?
  (Dr Brown) It goes in both directions because I should also say that many of my students are far more mature, more self-confident and challenging than I think I can recall being as an undergraduate. Many of them are very demanding students but the demand is related to I think an overall lesser amount of study time.

  166. Do you think it makes them more discerning—the fact they are effectively having to go out and pay for their own courses?
  (Dr Brown) Some of them certainly are, yes.

  167. Do you think also that maybe disillusionment or inability to cope means they are more likely to drop out? What is your view in terms of balance?
  (Dr Brown) You are bound to have increased drop out rates if your system becomes less selective and you only have to compare our system compared with the system on the continent to find that is the case. Within that, I think the introduction of fees, for example, has worked in both directions. On the one hand I think it has definitely discouraged people from certain groups such as mature students. On the other hand, it makes the students more determined to hang in there because someone is paying their fees and they want to succeed on the course. It goes in both directions and, frankly, we have not had the system in this country long enough to know what the longer term impacts are going to be.

  168. We were told that the drop-out rate stayed remarkably stable. Is that your experience?
  (Dr Brown) Well it was relatively stable until recently but my impression from the statistics published each year in the public expenditure survey show that retention rates are now beginning to worsen.

  169. Do you have figures on that?
  (Dr Brown) You probably have the advantage on me but I am pretty sure that for many years the Department's annual reports show there was not much variation in retention rates over the years but that they are now beginning to worsen.

Chairman

  170. The point Charlotte was bringing to your attention was made on Monday by the CVPC policy director that things still have not changed significantly.
  (Dr Brown) I personally would be surprised at that but I do not have the statistics in front of me.

Dr Harris

  171. My impression is the same as yours and I was somewhat surprised by the answer the CVPC gave, but I want to explore this a bit further. I want to come back to the problem of working students but when I asked you whether there was any evidence that quality was affected by increasing the number of students in a lecture hall or, at least, the number being taught at a lower cost than the existing cost per student, there was no evidence of that either way. Do you think that is because universities do not want to do the research which might show that they are offering a poorer quality and that it might happen but it is who blinks first to say their quality has dropped?
  (Dr Brown) I think that is certainly the case. The fact that institutions are in competition with one another means that no Vice Chancellor is going to do a Gerald Ratner frankly. With the concurrent competition between institutions and the emphasis upon compliance with external quality arrangements, it is very difficult for institutions to say honestly, "The quality of our provision is not as good as we would like it to be or not as good as the quality of the institution up the road". It is very difficult to have that kind of honesty when you know that what you say will affect your student recruitment. At the end of the day we are all basically learning businesses. In an institution like mine, unless we recruit enough students with the required qualifications we are not going to be in business and that very much drives a lot of this. That is the reality of it.

Chairman

  172. Are you saying that with the QAA and with the interlocking examination system and external examination system, despite those cautions and that monitoring process, you believe there is an overall sliding quality of qualifications?
  (Dr Brown) Because, if I may say so, Chairman, there has been no worthwhile study which I have ever seen which attempted to track quality and higher education on a longitudinal basis. All the apparatus of quality is about comparative provision—one institution against another, an institution against its own objectives. I am not genuinely aware of any study which attempts to track quality over a period. It would be very difficult to do in the same way it is difficult to track the performance of school examinations over a period and the difficulties there. At an institutional level it is not done very much either, beyond perhaps a comparison with the previous year's cohort and a particular subject and things of that kind. It is one of the big absences we have. We have a lot of resources devoted to quality assurance but very little of it is of that kind.

Dr Harris

  173. Your previous answer is very worrying. It may well be that quality is dropping but no one will admit it, and we cannot get quality and honesty in higher education because of competing business. Looking at this dropout rate, your answer to Charlotte Atkins' question suggested that there may be an increased likelihood of dropout for people who worked more and that may be associated with people who had less funding but there may be an increased stay-on rate for people who are paying tuition fees because they may be paying for it and therefore they may get value for money which will mean people who are means-tested will be better off, in fact. Is there any research showing where the dropout and retention rates vary across the income divide?
  (Dr Brown) I am not aware of it. A few years ago Professor Mantz Yorke of Liverpool John Moore's University did a study for the funding council about retention, and all I can do is refer you to his study. It is the most recent authoritative study I am aware of which looked at the reasons behind people dropping out. Also, dropping-out, non-retention, is a very, very complicated subject. There are many reasons why students drop out and if he does it is not necessarily a bad thing—either for the student or for the institution concerned. That is why I would urge some caution about the actual statistics. It is really what is behind the statistics that is really important and I do not think anybody really knows, to be honest.

Chairman

  174. I am glad you said that. In my experience we need a much more relaxed attitude about this and people should be expected to come into higher education, maybe go out for two years and then come back. But what they get during their time at university is important and it is portable and can be recognised when they are at a time to do so—especially with the more mature students. I have to pin you down before we move on and ask this: what you were saying about quality is not based on research carried out by anyone in your institution but a gut intuitive feeling, is that right?
  (Dr Brown) That is correct. As I say, no one has been more involved than me in quality assurance in the past ten years or thereabouts and, as I say, I am not aware of any worthwhile studies in Britain anyway which have looked at the question of whether quality has improved or deteriorated or standards have improved or deteriorated, in that period.
  (Professor Middlehurst) I would briefly just like to distinguish between the quality of student experience and the standards of programmes. Student experiences will be very different and their quality of life in an institution will differ—sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for less good reasons—but I think one has to distinguish that between quality of outcomes in terms of the degree achieved. Students can achieve a degree—the London External Examining Board, for example, provides no teaching at all and students can take that external examination—that is similar to on-line learning. We have to be careful about that very important distinction.

Helen Jones

  175. How accountable then do you think universities and higher education institutions are generally for the quality of the student experience? If a student has a grievance about the quality of experience they are receiving maybe about the teaching or about the resources available to them, how do they pursue it?
  (Dr Brown) That is a very good question. First of all, most institutions do take quality seriously and would take quality seriously even if it were not for all the external regulatory apparatus. However, it is true to say and the evidence suggests that the ways in which institutions respond to complaints about quality provision is very variable. As you know, there is a proposal that there should be some independent element in the way in which institutions look at complaints against the quality of their service and I personally would favour that very much. It is quite difficult to see how one can have that independent element particularly in institutions such as the traditional university which have visitors to deal with complaints of that kind but, in my view, some independent scrutiny is necessary—not least to protect the institution itself so that it itself can be seen to have handled a student complaint fairly. It is a patchy picture.
  (Professor Middlehurst) May I add this: the kind of contract, if you like, between the student and the institution is not always set out clearly in terms of what can be expected and what you might seek in the future as institutions decide to offer different forms of education is to set out very clearly what can be expected and what can be expected for a certain price.

  176. Do you think that will become more necessary as the student body is changing so rapidly? To put it in blunt terms, an 18-year-old at school might be prepared to accept what someone going back to university in later life with experience of a working environment might not be prepared to accept. How do you think visitors will have to change to accommodate those expectations?
  (Professor Middlehurst) They have to change their teaching practices but this also has considerable implications for the quality of their buildings and the nature of their buildings, or they may have to use, as we do, alternative accommodation—accommodation provided by others, not necessarily inside the university but in local learning centres around the university. It does have consequences. Teaching adults and teaching adults who have been used to different kinds of facilities has a lot of consequences for customer care.
  (Dr Brown) Can I just enter one note of caution in this: whilst I generally think that more could be done in this area, I am somewhat cautious about the whole area of academic appeals. In other words, I genuinely believe that only academic staff can make judgments about the worth of a student's academic achievement. My worry is if you put everything into the complaints area, you will end up students negotiating their classes of degree with their tutors. There is no doubt an academic, somewhere on this planet, who thinks that is a very good idea because there always is someone to support an idea of that kind but I think there has to be an area where the institution preserves its sovereignty, as it were. How you distinguish those academic matters from broader matters of student learning is very difficult, but I do think you have to preserve that academic sovereignty, otherwise it becomes devalued.

  Chairman: We have a lot of ground to cover and I really want to move on. I will allow Helen a very quick question but let's have shorter questions and shorter answers, please.

Helen Jones

  177. I accept what you say about the academic sovereignty but there are lots of other areas—mature students, students with family commitments—who will not be prepared to accept, for example, lecturers turning up late. Do you not have to get to grips with this?
  (Dr Brown) Yes, but no one has yet mentioned the question of the staff of the institutions. You asked Professor Middlehurst about borderless education and about the quality of student experience. The biggest challenge in higher education in my view is to get the staff to see themselves essentially as service providers. That is the big challenge and we have not achieved it yet.

Mr Marsden

  178. That brings us very neatly on to the questions I want to ask about the relationship between teaching and research and then to the quality of that research and how that feeds into the process. Perhaps I can put this to both of you. Why is it that teaching in higher education seems to have failed to benefit from research into pedagogical higher education activity but also, more broadly, into research?
  (Dr Brown) You want short answers and obviously we can provide further information in written form if that is helpful. My argument would be that, over time, teaching and research which originally were seen to be integral parts of what the university provided have become detached and separate activities. In many institutions they are conducted by separate people in separate places and, therefore, if you are going to tackle the interrelationship, which is a justification for having both activities in higher education, you have to find conscious ways of getting back in touch with one another again, and the Alan Jenkins article you referred to earlier is one set of ideas about that.
  (Professor Middlehurst) It is also a question of professionalism and focus. One of the reasons behind Roger's comment was that if you are assessed on research and teaching separately, then you are likely to have to expend resources there but the overall emphasis on professionalism in research and professionalism in teaching implies you have to spend a lot of time on pedagogy in order to be able to teach properly and on the research side in research training in order to be able to deliver on the research side. So it is not just a question of drivers, as Roger is indicating, though they are undoubtedly there. It is also the nature of being professional in either area that drives you to focus.

  179. But is the fact that they are assessed in separate boxes or looked at in separate boxes detrimental to the process?
  (Professor Middlehurst) Yes.
  (Dr Brown) Definitely.


 
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