Just as I am about to convene a group to review how we capture student feedback on modules, and try to find a more uniform way of doing it across faculties, then this interesting article appeared in the Higher, by John Colley of Nottingham University Business School.

Dr Colley considers how universities could improve student satisfaction, recognising that NSS scores have steadily risen over the years.

Firstly he identifies student evaluation of modules, and then discusses the more contentious issue of student evaluation of teaching.

“Unsurprisingly, SET is not universally popular with academics, some of whom yearn for the days when there was no objective way to assess their teaching effectiveness. Some staff are less than cooperative about the process and not all teaching is assessed, but one could argue that SET gives universities access to a tool that could be more fully exploited.”

He also points out that even when poor teaching is identified, then it’s very difficult for universities to do anything about it.

So two anecdotes. Last time I looked at evaluation of teaching, there was uproar that anyone other than the member of staff teaching could see the feedback forms from students. And secondly, I once carried out a peer observation of teaching. I was horrified, so were the students. I reported my findings to the head of subject. The outcome- nothing. For several more years students were given very poor teaching.

In a university that focuses on teaching, I believe that we need to really get to grips with this. If we want to improve student attainment, we need to know how teaching is being received by our students.

An interesting short article in the Times Higher this week, in which Baroness Bottomley, who is chair of the board of the headhunting firm Odgers Berndtson, states that in future teaching led institutions will look beyond the academy for leaders.

She suggests that large research intensive universities should continue to be run by academics, because an impressive research record is needed to gain respect of faculty staff.

Teaching led institutions on the other hand could be run by someone from outside academia.

So where shall we start? Working in a university that could be described as teaching led, this sounds like so much of the rhetoric we hear about universities from the current establishment. That is, the Russell Group are important, and considered to be “proper” universities, and no one else is.

Believe me, in an institution like ours, we also look up to our senior staff and expect them to be strong academically, in research and teaching. We have had a DVC with no academic background, and he did command respect but he was part of a team and brought very specific skills to the table An exec team still needs to include strong academic leadership.

So this isn’t to say that we can’t learn or benefit from senior staff with broader experiences, rather than having been in a University all their lives, but that successful organisations recognise the full range of skills and experiences needed.

And finally I’m old enough to remember the anagram you get from Virginia Bottomley’s name.

A shameless copy of Ed Miliband’s slogan from his conference speech maybe, but this could be a good way for us to look at how we approach what league tables are repeatedly telling us.

I’ve given presentations to two of our faculties on understanding league tables, and what we need to do to improve our position. I always ask people where in a table do they think we should come. The answer lies between 50 and 70, always. Bearing in mind that our position in any of the tables, no matter what the methodology, is not this high the maybe we can take away the following two ideas. Firstly, that there is a will there to work together to change things, and a recognition that improving our position will help with our own feelings of self worth.

The key point of my talk is to explain that league tables are not “something that is done to us”, rather they are just a mirror held up to show us who we are. And if we are uglier than we want to be, then we need to start to do something about it.

Essentially there are two sets of data that go to make up the tables – input and output data. Like all universities, we are now making sure that our input data – staff student ratios, spend per student, entry grades are reflecting us in the best possible light.

The output data is that which can be affected most by faculty staff.

National Student Survey results

Over the years we have invested time and effort in improving our scores in the NSS. This year our scores rose again, but again so did the sector. We have ambitious targets in our university plan, of where we want to get to in terms of student satisfaction, and it’s pleasing to see that this is finally bearing fruit. At the development day for Academic Group Leaders, Peter Jones (Head of school, Psychology, Sport and Exercise) provided an excellent approach that can be used to engage students better with NSS, and demonstrated how he had used this approach to massively improve the scores in his previous institution.

Proportion of good degrees

All league tables use the proportion of good degrees as an output measure, The Guardian uses a factor called “value added”. This is essentially number of 1sts and 2(i)s moderated by entry qualification (it’s worth noting that the university with the highest value added score is Oxford, so value added isn’t quite what we think about when we talk about our commitment to widening participation).

The number of good degrees that we award is low compared with most universities in the sector. This is the one factor where I am challenged the most when I make presentations on the topic. Let me be clear – for us to perform better as a university, we would need to offer more good degrees, but that does not mean lowering our academic standards. It’s a matter of recognising what is happening first of all in the rest of the sector, and in our comparator organisations. Secondly, as a university which has prided itself on being “teaching-led”, then we need to make sure that our focus on teaching and learning does pay real dividends in terms of student attainment. We can be better than we are on this. If other universities take in students with the same entry grades as us, but are able to get them to gain good degrees, then they are adding more value than we do. A key focus for us has to be student attainment, and making sure that as many of our students as possible can get better degrees.

Research scores

Research isn’t measured in the Guardian league table, which is the one we refer to in our university plan. It is however in all the other league tables, and many of our stakeholders don’t just read the Guardian.

Our current research score is poor – the lowest amongst our comparators – and is based on the 2008 RAE.  The forthcoming REF submission has to be designed to gain the maximum score possible for us. Pleasingly we have recently appointed a number of new subject based professors and associate professors, and I would assume that all of them will be submitted into the forthcoming REF, together with our extincting professoriate to make for a strong submission.

More broadly than research though, we are now recording all elements of scholarly output. All teaching staff should be part of a community of scholars, even if they are not currently working at a level of international  publications, but will recognise that a commitment to scholarship and production of outputs has a beneficial impact on learning and teaching. If we want our students to engage in enquiry based learning, and experience research informed teaching, then all of us need to be demonstrating what it means to be both a professional educator and a subject practitioner.

Graduate prospects or employability

This score appears in all the league tables, and students and prospective students are rightly concerned about how taking a particular degree at a particular institution will increase their opportunities to gain a graduate level job. It is clear that employability is strongly related to degree outcome, and most of us have heard stories of employers who won’t look at anyone will less than a 2(i). This brings us back to the issue of good degrees – we need to make sure we can maximise student attainment, to give our graduate the best opportunity of gaining graduate level jobs.

Essentially we have to look hard at our individual teaching and assessment practices, to make sure that students have the best opportunity to gain a good degree. after all, would you come to the university where in a subject there is a 40% chance of getting a good degree or the one with a 60% chance?

To support our work on this, then I’ll be talking to all faculties, and sharing detail of our updated portfolio performance review data. This allows anyone to see at a glance how all of of undergraduate awards perform, in terms of recruitment, retention, attainment and student outcomes.

Also the Academic Development Unit will write attainment into all of our plans- we know lots of what we do is better than some of the external data tells us, now we just need to make sure that we all work to understand why the reflection in the mirror appears as it does, and to come together to become better. After all, we, and our students will be the beneficiaries.
 

This weekend I took part in the British Heart Foundation midnight bike ride from Manchester to Blackpool.
A big thank you to everyone who sponsored me- I raised over £400 plus the gift aid  and donations can still be made here
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It was a great ride, on relatively quiet main roads and we finished in 3hrs 40mins having decided to forgo any of the rest stops. One thing I learned (and thanks to Peter Jones for the advice) is that caffeine gels are great for for keeping you going. I may replace my morning coffee with these in future.

The final big UK league table of the year has been published by the Sunday Times and The Times, and rather than being two separate guides from the two newspapers, is now  a single university guide.

Since the data used in this  is the same as that we have already seen in the Complete University Guide and the Guardian University Guide, albeit with different methodology and weighting factors, then we cannot be surprised at the results.

As ever, the top spots are occupied by Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, St Andrews and Imperial. Looking through the table at unis we might compare ourselves to reveals:

We’ll be doing some further work to look at the details, and certainly some of the tables provided by the Guide, in terms of student population characteristics will be interesting to delve into, particularly considering the “social class” of undergraduate students.

Full details will be provided to Heads of School in the next couple of weeks.

Last Friday, I gave a presentation to the the Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies Forum.

The presentation was similar to one I have used previously in other faculties and schools, but with more opportunity for discussion.

We focused on university league tables, particularly on generating the understanding that league tables are not something that are done to us, but are just a reflection of our performance.

We looked at: why league tables are important; their flaws; what thy say about us now; how student information can influence them and what we could be doing to improve our position.

On this last point, of improvement, we looked at the work being carried out centrally on data returns, but the key area for development is in student satisfaction and attainment. They key question has to be “why do students here, entering with similar entry qualifications to elsewhere, have a lower chance of gaining a good degree?”

This is always a contentious issue, and inevitably there were comments about threats to academic standards, but also a recognition that if we could recruit better qualified students, so their attainment might improve.

I’m hoping that the discussion on improving attainment will gain traction over this year, in all faculties and schools, as this will be a central focus of Academic Development Unit Activity.

One quick win is to look at final year modules where, for whatever reason, students appear to under-perform, compared with on their other modules. An approach for considering this is offered by Graham Gibbs, as part of the TESTA project. We’ll be looking at this methodology as we look at the results obtained on all modules for the last 3 years.

Yawn.

This week FutureLearn leaunched its first MOOCs. FutureLearn is the company set up from the Open University to be a British supplier of MOOCs, working in partnership with a number of Russell Group universities.

The initial offerings are available now for students to enrol on, and include topics such as: Begin programming: build your first mobile game; Discover dentistry; Introduction to forensic science, and The mind is flat: the shocking shallowness of human psychology. I’m just hoping that the dentistry course doesn’t have a practical element.

Speaking about the launch, Prof Martin Bean of the Open University said:

“FutureLearn would be “modularised” and involve “a completely different way of structuring” courses, we’re not going to talk about failures. We’re going to let people set their own targets – god forbid – and measure themselves against their own targets.”

Students would be able to “benchmark” themselves against peers rather than always having to be subject to what he termed “The Man”, “the university saying: ‘You’re a failure because you didn’t do what we said’. I challenge the whole outdated paradigm.”

So, tune in, turn on and drop out  next?

But the key quotation has to be:  “One thing that FutureLearn will never do is to confer university credit. That will always be the domain of the university.”

This is interesting and leads to his final comment about how universities might use MOOCs, to act as a way of granting free access to content, after universities recignise that their future is not about protecting the content that hey own, but by differentiating themselves by their approaches to student experience, pastoral care, teaching and employment opportunities.

I’ve previously blogged about BME attainment issues, and researched the data pertaining to our university on how degree classification can be affected by ethnicity and disability, so a few recent news items were therefore of interest.

Firstly, a cross party group of MPs, led by David Lammy,  will carry out  a study entitled “Race and Higher Education“.

“As the job market becomes more competitive it is increasingly important for young people to make themselves as employable as possible. Higher education is seen by many employers as being the most direct way to do this,” a statement released on behalf of the all-party group says.

“As a result, the inquiry will seek to discover whether members of the BME community are being given equal access to the benefits of higher education and whether or not higher education is of equal value in the long term.”

It will be interesting to see how much this piece of work addresses the issues of student success and attainment.

Secondly, a report in the Guardian, questioned why computer science graduates topped the unemployment tables. (I don’t think that is the case at Staffordshire),and proposed that some of the factors were obvious, such as the quality of the degree obtained, location within the UK, and institution of study, but that one other key factor was the employment rates of black and minority ethnic (BME) students:

“BME graduates have higher unemployment rates across all subjects, and even BME computer science students from Russell Group institutions had a 16.7% unemployment rate compared to an average Russell Group unemployment rate of 7.2%. However, we do need to be clear that many of these students come from, and still live in, areas of extremely high unemployment, where a figure of 16.7% would be heralded as a significant success story.

It can and should be argued that any consideration of graduates’ employment needs to be contextualised against their contemporaries, rather than making unrealistic comparisons between institutions that draw from significantly different demographics. Having said that, there is considerable bias in the employment prospects for graduates of BME origin with similar or better qualifications than their white counterparts, which has even resulted in graduates changing or “anglicising” their names to obtain interviews.”

The article also points out that CS , particularly in post-92 universities has contributed significantly to widening participation success, with BME students opting for CS instead of other STEM subjects with “64% of computer science students studying at post-92s (65% of those BME students), as opposed to 13% at Russell Group universities (10% of those BME).”

I wrote a short piece on this a couple of weeks ago, which ended with a range of questions:

1. Do our students leave here with the “right” social and cultural capital?

2. Would it be possible to build this into a modular award structure?

3. Would students understand the benefit of material that is not subject based?

4. Who decides what is appropriate socially and culturally?

5. Would any work on this be based against groups (eg BME) who may have a different view of appropriate social and cultural capital

6. Is this the responsibility of a University?

Clearly I don’t have any answers yet to these, but a number of conversations since I wrote this suggest that there might be something here worth pursuing.

A meeting with the VC and Chief Executive of the Equality Challenge Unit, where we looked at a range of diversity and equality issues, was one where he raised the idea of inequity due to differing levels of social capital.

In today’s Observer, an article describes how Debretts’s is now providing courses (a snip at  £1000) on “social intelligence”:

“the Debrett’s research flags up rising concerns among business people about the employability of graduates and school leavers who have been tested to the maximum academically, but have no notion of what to expect from a job. The accusation is that schools and universities are so focused on academic targets that they are failing to produce rounded graduates. Instead they are turning out young people who are shy and awkward after spending all their time on the internet or mobiles, who lack the ability to spell or write a letter, and are unable to get through a day without regular online checks on what their friends are up to.”

Ignoring the claims that technology might be to blame (and although the online world can be dominant, there also has to be a recognition of its importance), there are suggestions that a number of employers are coming across graduates with excellent grades but who don;t have the other key social skills necessary.

It seems therefore that there might be something here for us as a University to look at. The critical question will how we do so. On the one hand, this will be an excellent area for research, linking together ideas from sociology and education. At the same time though, as well as developing a theoretical understanding we would need to develop practical approaches that could have a real impact on students.

After discussions with colleagues in Education, then it is apparent that the more important area might be that of social capital, where:

“We think of capital as being of two types. Bonding and bridging. Bonding ‘glues’ you in to a place / way of being / approach etc . Bridging gets you out of it. We actually need both types of capital. Bonding gives us a sense of permanence and security but it can also restrict us and stop us growing beyond what we are. ” (M Lowe)

In addition there are the concerns about how we might state what we feel is important or necessary social capital (as I suggested previously), particularly in a region (Stoke on Trent)  of low educational aspiration, and where we need to recognise  that there may be very strong social capital already (particularly of the bonding type) which it would be unreasonable to challenge, while at the same time trying to identify how we could increase the amount of bridging capital. (discussion with K Vigurs)

Based on a project bid I have just completed, I have a particular interest in how we could build in some of these ideas into a set of postgraduate attributes, as a way of enhancing employability beyond high level subject expertise.

Interestingly, at least one author (Moss, Electronic Journal of Sociology (2005) ISSN: 1198 3655 “Cultural Capital and Graduate Student Achievement:A Preliminary Quantitative Investigation”)  suggests that the Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital may not apply to graduate students, although the  author acknowledges he used a small sample, and concludes:

“Further research is needed in order to confirm or refute this study’s preliminary findings. Graduate level education is a prerequisite for virtually all high-status careers. If students who undergo such education are in fact subject to educational inequities based on their socioeconomic origins, then we should suggest educational efforts designed to ameliorate these inequities, and establish the critical contention that our nation’s highest level of education is not conducted on a level socioeconomic playing field.”

Ultimately this is the kind of challenge that faces any modern university in city where traditional industries have declined and the city is developing a new identity. It is the opportunity for a university to go beyond providing a reflection of its locale and to become a catalyst for raising aspiration.