Tag: university teaching

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What is to be done?

This is a response to Liz Morrish’s article on whether universities “are meaningful to the academics who work within them“. You should read the whole article, but the crux of it is here:

In the McCarthyite era it was the army and Hollywood which were in the front line of political persecution. This time it is scientists who are finding that their notions of working in an objective, apolitical enclosure have been disrupted by Donald Trump’s attacks on their right to report valid climate change research.  Scientists are now being drawn into political action committees to face down potential threats to funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and, perhaps, to the teaching of evolution in publicly funded schools.

While we stand with beleaguered scientists, I hope we can also defend experts in nuclear and apocalyptic literature in austerity Britain, and a new scholarship of authoritarianism  because we must all be vigilant to make sure universities continue to be sites of resistance to the rollback of the enlightenment.

This is a quick response, following the engineering practice that good enough today is better than perfect tomorrow.

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Meet the new normal, same as the old normal

We are being told that the present state of chassis is #notnormal, and that we should not normalize it. Zoe Williams in the Guardian talks of what is now being accepted as `normal’, whether under Trump or after the Brexit vote, and lays the blame where it belongs:

Normalising is not anything the rightwing extremists do, and they do not try: they don’t look for acceptable labels for themselves. It is the mainstream that twists itself into conciliatory pretzel knots finding nicer words for “fascist”, such as “alt-right”.

Democrats try to find the fault within themselves: ask not whether a racist hates; ask what made the racist so angry in the first place. Once we have found the right member of the liberal elite to pin it on, the hate maybe won’t sound so frightening.

The reason things seem `normal’ or `normalized’ is that they have been treated as normal for years, certainly within higher education. For example,

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How to be a bastard: crowd control in the academy

When I had my first academic job, new staff spent a couple of days of induction learning about how to teach. On the afternoon of the last day, which was the Friday before teaching started, the course tutor asked if there was anything he hadn’t covered which we would like to learn about.

A colleague said he had 150 first year engineering students on Monday. I laughed. The course tutor laughed. Nobody else laughed. The tutor explained to the other academics, mainly from the humanities, that engineering students, at least in Ireland, are a notorious shower of animals, liable to throw things at the lecturer, including, on one occasion, a frozen chicken.

“So you want to know how to be a bastard?”
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What’s wrong with numerical feedback?

In short: the numbers are wrong, and the statistics are worse.

Like other academics in the UK and elsewhere, I am judged as a teacher on the basis of feedback from students taking my courses. In some institutions, not doing well enough on this feedback can lead to dismissal. The problem is that this feedback is largely meaningless.

In my university, as in others, the feedback takes the form of comments (valuable and useful for thinking about teaching practice) and a numerical score between 1 and 5 under a number of headings. These scores are then averaged and, in my department, any score under 3.5 is reason to fill in a form explaining what action will be taken to make sure it does not happen next year.

The first problem with the numerical feedback is that students are not good judges of teaching. Insofar as there is evidence from proper trials, it seems that the numerical scores awarded by students do not reflect how well they have learned from their teachers. In other words, the numbers going in are unreliable, especially since with low return rates the results are dominated by students who are disgruntled or very gruntled.

Secondly, the final score is unreliable. As you will know from following opinion polls before elections, when you take a small sample of a group, there is an inevitable error in the resulting estimate of the average. This is especially true when the sample is biased towards the extremes. In my university, students give scores between 1 and 5: averages are presented to three significant figures 1.00 to 5.00.

To see what is wrong with this, think of the distinction between precision and accuracy, something every first engineering student must learn: precision is the number of decimal places, accuracy is the number of decimal places you can believe.

A typical class size might be 40 students. On a 25% submission rate (typical), ten students put numbers in to be averaged. Doing the sums, if one student changes a mark by one, say from 3 to 4, the average changes by 0.1. The academic is assessed on the basis of a difference of 0.01: 3.5 good, 3.49 is a problem. In other words, decisions are made by believing the noise in the signal. A single anonymous student, cheesed off because he has been set an exam question he has never seen before, can ruin a career.

We have numbers which are probably wrong to start with, in biased samples too small to be statistically valid, forced through an averaging process to give a spurious precision, and a management prepared to use these numbers as an `objective’ measure of teaching `quality’.

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Paying for education

As seems likely, we in the UK are about to see the price of education hiked by another few grand a year. It turns out that the problem of what to pay for education was solved by William Blake a couple of centuries ago:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain

or, if you prefer, fame costs:

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A pox on student satisfaction

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? (T. S. Elliott)

One of the methods used to rate universities, and departments, in the UK is the National Student Survey, based on a questionnaire seeking new graduates’ opinions of their degree courses. It claims to `build a broader picture of the quality of Higher Education‘ by measuring student satisfaction. In the interests of transparency, I should declare that my employer is very proud of having the highest NSS score in the land.

The logic here seems to be that if students are satisfied, the university has done its job properly. Students are invited to think like customers, because they are paying, and because customer satisfaction is the objective of the supplier. Apart from the unexamined assumption that `satisfaction’ is the same thing as good service, for this to work, students need to forget that charging for a service puts a limit on what is to be expected: you can’t get more than you pay for, if you pay in cash, and if you do not invest part of yourself, `satisfaction’ is all you will get from the transaction.
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What do they know of education, who only education know?

Scot L. Newstok has proposed the term `close learning’ to refer to university education as we presently understand it:

“Close learning” evokes the laborious, time-consuming, and costly but irreplaceable proximity between teacher and student. “Close learning” exposes the stark deficiencies of mass distance learning such as MOOCs, and its haste to reduce dynamism, responsiveness, presence.

Or, in summary, “to what are they being given access?”

The argument about access to higher education, the ground on which much of the mooc stooshie is being fought out, is based on ideas about social mobility, and meritocracy: in short, going to university will let you make more money and escape the harsh grinding poverty (intellectual and financial) of whatever benighted hole spawned you.
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How do you mooc a project?

`Technology’, pace the scuttering gobsheens of hipsterismo eroico, snug and smug in their rolled-up jeans and heavy-rimmed spectacles, is not the collective noun for the latest beeping, whistling gewgaw from some fruit-monikered design house. It is all of the objects that let us be human. Rejecting technology means eating worms and in-season plants dug from the ground with your bare hands, your naked hairy body kept warm only by a layer of filth. R. R. Wilson famously said of Fermilab that it had “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.” Technology does not make our society worth defending; it makes our society.
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