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I’m currently working on a project called ‘FASTECH’, funded by JISC, so any stories on Feedback/Assessment are of interest. I’ve also been working on a module called Manipulating Media for the past 18 months, which we’ve developed with clear expectations of the assignment, ongoing ‘consultancy’, and a mix of peer/tutor feedback:

In a paper entitled “Reconceptualising assessment feedback: A key to improving student learning?”, published in the latest issue of Studies in Higher Education, the researchers say that a “fault line” exists between secondary and tertiary education.

In particular, they say that young people develop a set of expectations about academic support as a result of their experience at school, but when they get to university, these expectations are shattered by what is on offer.

To address this, the authors advise that the first year of higher education should be viewed as a transitional stage between the supported learning provided in secondary education and the independence currently expected at university.

During this year, students should be given “preparatory” guidance before an assignment, “in-task” guidance during the project and “performance feedback” at the end.

The authors, Chris Beaumont and Michelle O’Doherty of Edge Hill and Lee Shannon of Liverpool Hope, say universities should change their approach from isolated “events” of summative performance feedback to a continual “guidance process”.

This should include a greater emphasis on verbal and one-to-one interaction between tutor and student, they say. They also suggest that feedback should be standardised to a greater degree.

Read full story.

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Interesting. Networking has always been part of academic life, but there’s clearly been a shift from finding those ‘of similar mind’ to those who can help fund your work…

A significant number of academics feel it is not part of their job to help businesses bring their research to market, according to an investigation into attitudes to knowledge transfer.

Such activity is high on the political agenda, with David Willetts, the universities and science minister, challenging institutions to increase their income from knowledge transfer by 10 per cent over the next three years.

However, scholars often think they do not have the skills to network with the business leaders who could turn their research into a new product or service, according to a PhD thesis written by Kristel Miller, a teaching fellow in management at the University of Abertay Dundee.

About 40 per cent of the researchers questioned who were working with the university to commercialise their work said they felt they had been “forced” to do so, Ms Miller told Times Higher Education.

Read the full story.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150899837380161&set=a.10150899836315161.758741.656235160&type=3&theater

Is this not every academic’s dream? A keen, engaged audience (likely because you are providing interesting, dynamic and interactive content):

It is 3.55pm on a dark winter’s afternoon, but the philosophy seminar on “Radical democracy and Rousseau” shows no sign of flagging.

Eager, earnest students are still desperate to make their final points before the hour is up, awaiting that split-second pause that will let them jump back into the debate.

Close your eyes and you might well think you were listening to a typical undergraduate tutorial, complete with idealistic, left-wing students keen to challenge their classmates, the lecturer and society in general – that is until you hear the sound of the No 76 bus to Waterloo thunder past just a few yards away.

This is actually Tent City University, the centrepiece of the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, a “pop-up” seat of learning spinning off from the anti-capitalist protest movement.

The flimsy plastic sides of the makeshift marquee are the only thing that separates visitors from the freezing elements and the din of central London traffic, but Tent City University has become one of the camp’s big success stories.

Thousands of people have sat down here to listen to academics, writers and political activists hold forth on a variety of subjects since the camp was set up on 15 October last year.

Read full story.

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We still don’t have anonymous marking, and I certainly find it wrong in a world where we are increasingly giving feed-forward (and therefore would know whose piece of work it is), and are looking for students to provide personalised assignments using online tools such as blogs – which means we HAVE to know who they are:

In recent years, the practice of “blind marking” students’ written work has become almost universal in UK universities. Why? This is because research indicates that some examiners give higher or lower marks to students they know, or whose sex or race they know, than they would if they did not know whose work they were marking. This is obviously unfair and damaging to the career prospects of students who are marked down. So university administrations have taken action by depriving examiners of the information leading to the bias, and insisting that scripts are anonymised before being assessed. But this strategy is misguided: it does not address the real source of the problem and it seriously damages the educational culture.

When I got my first job as an academic in the late 1960s, assessment was a largely intuitive process, in which academics were hardly more articulate about the criteria they were applying than chicken-sexers, and students were entirely in the dark as to what they needed to do to get good marks. I well remember examiners’ meetings in which colleagues would say things like: “I just sensed from the first paragraph that this candidate has a 2:1-ish sort of mind.” We have come a long way since then, with explicit course specifications and the compulsory training of new teaching staff. Nevertheless, we are still a long way from an ideal world in which students fully understand what is expected of them, and staff assess their work solely on the basis of published criteria rather than on the extraneous characteristics of the individual student. In general, academics have not been good at specifying clear criteria by which written work is to be assessed, or at ensuring that their students internalise these criteria, or at applying them impartially.

In my view, the solution to the problem is not anonymous marking; it is to build on the progress that has already been made towards creating an academic culture in which every teacher takes pride in their professionalism and impartiality, and is respected for it by students and administrators alike. In that culture, students will be treated equally on the basis of their actual performance, and will no more need to be anonymised than patients consulting their doctors, or clients consulting their lawyers.

Read full story… which echoes what I’ve written at the top!

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This story just caught my eye, as there’s that interesting balance between privacy in research and open-ness – this time with legal ramifications. Surely in exposing the data, they will be breaching other privacy laws – e.g. they would have collected the data for a specific purpose, and contract said ‘data not to be released until after death’… Quite concerning.

The folk tale about the academic who accidentally deleted his data is older than the PC, but have you heard the one about the researchers who asked their institution to destroy all their work? No? Well that’s exactly what the researchers behind Boston College’s Belfast Project, an oral history of the Northern Irish conflict, have done.

“The archive must now be closed down and the interviews be either returned or shredded since Boston College is no longer a safe nor fit and proper place for them to be kept,” reads a statement issued by the project’s erstwhile director Ed Moloney and former researchers Anthony McIntyre and Wilson McArthur.

The reason for the dramatic declaration is as disarming as it is simple: within the coming weeks, a court in the US is to decide whether interviews with former paramilitaries in Northern Ireland conducted as part of the project should be handed over to the British authorities. All interviewees, including leading figures in the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, were promised that their recordings would not be released until after their death: now they could form the basis for criminal proceedings.

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Just thought this was interesting, as an academic from Manchester Business School ‘reluctantly’ concludes from his research that we should consider segregating men/women in learning because of their different learning styles.

“Personality differences aren’t aptitude, they’re just differences in…the way you behave,” he said. “It’s not that one personality is better than the other, it just tends to fit people better to certain situations.”

Read full article, and some interesting comments coming through too.

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With stories that schools are ‘sending difficult students out before Ofsted inspections‘, there are suggestions that Universities are also massaging their expertise – and a call that all should be included in the REF:

“The European Union economy doesn’t look too bad – if you exclude Greece and perhaps a couple of others from the 27.” “Spurs are a decent team, if you don’t count those games in which goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes gifted points to the opposition.” “2011 was an excellent financial year for our unit trust, if you discount the poor performance of one or two of the companies in which we invest.”

Yet we don’t rate the EU by choosing which economies to include or exclude, nor does the team that wins the Barclays Premier League get to miss out its worst performances before the final ranking. And investors would be living in cloud cuckoo land if they thought they could ignore a unit trust’s poorly performing components. We do, however, allow something similar to happen when assessing research in British universities. Why?

Read full story.

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Interesting. University of Winchester have raised banners that say “We’ve listened to you”, demonstrating how. It’s important to take the student view on board, but how often do we end up responding to these results – is there not a better way to measure… and it’s worrying when these are used as the MAIN criteria – and education falls into danger of being edutainment!

Have you raised the banners yet? Ordered the free hot dogs? Set up the laptops? Yes, it’s that time again. Up and down the land, exhortations will flash across plasma screens, encouraging messages will fill noticeboards, and bright-faced student ambassadors will lie in wait at strategic points ready to grab any passing third-year. For next month, the National Student Survey begins.

Since 2005, when the Ipsos Mori poll first began, this annual judgement day has assumed more and more importance. It is increasingly viewed by the media, student applicants and their parents, and even the government as the absolute barometer of university health.

It’s not as if we’re not always trying to improve what we do. But we’re now so aware of how influential the NSS has become that we put massive efforts into making sure our students know that we have responded to their concerns.

Read full story.

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One that made me think… what these students are fighting for to get an education, when in the UK students often want it on a plate…

Once, during Ramadan in the mid-1990s, Erfan Sabeti was on his way to an all-day genetics class at the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education in Tehran.

He had taken to wearing a tie to show he was not a hard-liner, though the Ayatollah Khomeini had just issued a fatwa saying that ties were a symbol of westernisation. As he was about to get into a taxi, he was stopped by revolutionary guards.

Young and fearless at the time, Sabeti immediately told them he was a Baha’i going to a meeting, where the accepted costume was suit and tie. So they took him to their headquarters and one of them said: “You Baha’is are very cheeky, because we’ve got you ‘on our tongue’. We could swallow you up whenever we wanted, if it wasn’t for pressure from the international community.”

“They interrogated me for three or four hours,” Sabeti recalls now, “cut my tie and fined me about £5. By lunchtime they let me go. My professor was very worried and almost fainted when I told the story, because of the risk that I’d been followed.”

“Mona” (not her real name) also remembers that she and fellow students of the BIHE had to keep the location of classes and labs secret in order to avoid raids by the government.

“We were particularly cautious about the labs, because we didn’t want our textbooks, equipment, photocopiers, computers and teaching materials to be confiscated.”

So what exactly is the BIHE? Why has it long been a target of official hostility in Iran, subject to a notable crackdown in 1998 and now under even more severe threat?

Read full story.

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Having participated on the fringes of #occupy, this story attracted my interest (and the poster above uses a number of iconic memes!):

The Occupy movement is a disparate yet articulate protest movement directed against economic and social inequality. Although it has not rushed to make demands, it has galvanised support with the slogan “The 99 per cent”, referring to the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent of income earners. As a meme, “Occupy” has propagated far and wide, but it does not appear to have gained as much traction as one might have thought among those at university. This is not 1968. Like structuralism then, the mass of students today are not taking to the streets.

Occupy Wall Street came to an unglamorous end in mid-November, and the clock is officially ticking for the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London. One protester I met in the “Information Tent” at St Paul’s was pragmatic. All the tents, he explained, would be removed as soon as the court ruling decreed. But I was also told that the idea of Occupy will remain steadfast.

During a lecture, I wrote on the board “#ows”, the Twitter hashtag then circulating in relation to Occupy Wall Street. I asked if anyone recognised it. Out of some 60 media undergraduates – many of them Twitter users – not one knew. And even when told, a less-than-excited murmur rippled through the room. Despite a number of high-profile scholars lending support to the Occupy movement, little interest has registered across the other 99 per cent of the university population.

Read full story.