There’s one thing that drives me completely mad with students, and that is those who don’t attend… and then complain that they don’t know what they’re doing & want extra tuition… It seems to come with increasing consumerisation… we’re paying, so you deliver it how we want it… well, students don’t always know what’s best… We want to make it a good LEARNING experience, but sometimes there’s some tough stuff that has to be got through…
Interesting Article in @timeshighered
To maintain our high standards of education, we must enforce the most elemental requirement: attendance. Adrian Quinn writes
Every year there comes an awkward moment when I meet a student for the first time. It’s not at induction, but at the final exam. I make a point of learning the names of all my students and I often know where they come from, so it’s not a mistake. These students have presented themselves to be assessed for a module in which they did not take part.
Britain has been a pioneer in the development of distance-learning programmes leading to credible qualifications, but that’s not the kind of teaching I have so far been involved in.
Speaking at the Labour Party conference a few years ago, former prime minister Gordon Brown said that Britain “has to be number one for standards in education. We have got to make sure that every young person’s talent and potential is challenged and that we get the best out of people.” But where British universities are keen to monitor all aspects of the teaching and assessment of students, those same institutions often shy away from enforcing the most elemental requirement: attendance.
A real issue for teachers in a now expanded higher education sector is: how do we get the best out of a young person who shows contempt for the learning process? Is the permissive impulse a real barrier to Britain becoming number one?
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