New Video Transcript - University of Edinburgh Thomas... · 2015. 7. 16. · Video Transcript...

Video Transcript

Gearing Up for Transitions 2015

Keynote

Professor Liz Thomas, Liz Thomas Associates

Host – Professor Ian Pirie:

So it gives me great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker today, Professor Liz Thomas.

For many of you, Liz will require no introduction, with Liz as a Professor of Higher Education,

is leading a major project currently with Higher Education Academy, and has written numerous

books on learning and teaching and the issues surrounding supporting diverse student groups,

and also, of course, transitions. So welcome, Liz.

Professor Liz Thomas:

Well, thank you very much indeed. I have to say with having the students on before that doesn’t

leave so much to be said, does it? They’ve said it all really well with all their wise words and

reflections on the various aspects of the transition experience, however, I’ve been asked to

talk to you for about forty five minutes. On the other hand, a lot of my work is about active

learning and teaching and engagement in things, so you’re not going to be able to sit there

and fall asleep for the forty five minutes. There are a few places where I’d like you to kind of

become more active and engage. So what I want to do is cover some of the ideas about

transitions in higher education and beyond, and then draw on the What Works program that

Ian mentioned, and talk about some examples of effective transition activities. And then I want

to draw a little bit on some current work about independent learning and how that prepares

students for the transition to employment and postgraduate study. And if we have time, to look

at what institutions need to be doing at the more institutional or strategic level to enable those

transitions to take place, or rather to enable staff and other colleagues in institutions to work

together to improve the transition experiences.

So this is a slide that I developed previously for the QAA enhancement scheme launch on the

new transitions theme. And I think the more you think about the transitions the more you realise

there are just numerous transitions that students are making in and through and after higher

education. And so we perhaps traditionally thought of it about students coming in, but students

are coming in and out, in and out of different parts of the higher education system and entering

into employment and perhaps back into postgraduate study. I noticed an article when I was

preparing for this which was saying “helping students to learn from their transition experience

into university to prepare them for their other transitions.” And when I looked at it - it didn’t

seem to be doing that. I admit I didn’t read it thoroughly. But I think that’s a really good idea,

how much we might reflect on our transition into Higher Education perhaps the first time, and

how that might prepare us to make other future transitions that we need to be doing, that we

have to undertake as we go through life.

<next slide 2.52>

And I think that it’s important to think about the different elements or aspects, that they’re

included in transitions. So there are academic transitions. Earlier this week I was reading a

PhD about transition into higher education, and I’ve described it here as academic transitions

to a new way of learning. But you can think of this as epistemological and ontological

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transitions. So knowing how to learn differently, and thinking about your subject in a completely

different way.

But there are also social transitions and the students there really highlighted the importance

of friends and peers and integrating. So there were all sorts of things about societies and

accommodation and talking to existing students. So you have to kind of move into these new

groups of people. And much of the research on transition shows that students are not really

concerned about the academic transitions. That doesn’t mean that they don’t find them difficult

but they’re not concerned about them pre-entry, certainly. But they are really concerned about

those social transitions. And I’m sure for us, if we start a new job or something, it’s often about

getting on with people which is more daunting than having the skills to do the work.

But I think again as the students highlighted there are huge numbers of personal transitions

which are a result of changes in your circumstances, and indeed your identity, of becoming a

student again or becoming an employee or whatever. And I think we perhaps should think

about professional or organisational transitions to a new organisational culture. And I think

culture is perhaps a good way of thinking about some of this because it’s about the way things

are done around here. And I want to try to illustrate that idea about transition being challenging

with a really simple example from my daughter.

My daughter is seven years old and she’s very proud of being up here on the screen today.

She thinks she’s quite famous now. And I was on a long car journey with her, and I was

negotiating a new road layout system in Derby, and she said “mummy, I just want to do some

maths now.” I said “oh, great.” So she asked me some questions. So she said “what’s thirty

eight plus eight?” “Oh, its’ forty six.” She said “no, mummy. No, no, that’s wrong. It’s forty

eight.” I said “don’t be silly, of course it’s forty six, it’s not forty eight.” “No, mummy, try another

one. Forty three plus three.” “Okay, that’s forty six.” “No, mummy, that’s forty three.” I said

“honey, you’re just wrong. What are these roads doing? Oh, my god.” And so she said “keep

trying, mummy. I’m sure you’ll find it gets easier. Twenty seven plus six.” “Okay, twenty seven

plus six, that’s thirty three.” “No, mummy, that’s thirty seven.” And so it goes on. You may have

got this, I’m a bit slow. I am negotiating a complex new road system in Derby. So fifteen minus

two is obviously fifteen. And fifty six minus six is obviously forty six. I got really frustrated at

this point because I can do maths, seven year old maths, after all. But I couldn’t understand

it. And she was adamant that she was right. And she explained the system to me, and actually

it does make sense, but the point is that the academic rules have changed, and I didn’t

understand the rules and that made me feel frustrated, and fairly vulnerable, and fairly stupid,

and much more interested in the road system.

<recording plays>

“It’s easy, my maths. You just round the number you are adding or taking away to the nearest

ten. So for example, fifteen take away two equals fifteen because you’re always rounding to

the nearest ten.”

So now she’s explained it to you too and it is pretty easy, isn’t it? So it does rely on our basic

maths skills but if you don’t know what the skills are or the rules, the academic rules, are,

you’re using, it’s really hard. And I think this is true about huge aspects of transition, that we

know how to learn in different contexts. We know how to integrate in different contexts, but we

don’t understand the context or the rules of the situation that we’re entering into. So for

example sometimes international students experience issues with plagiarism. And that’s

because the way they’ve been learning in different educational systems is different. It doesn’t

meant that with explanation and transparency they can’t do it. They just have to have those

simple explanations and support to move to that new way of doing things.

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<next slide 7.22>

So here’s the quiz. Transition is different into higher education. I’ve already told you the answer

to this, I’m stupid. Are students more worried about the academic or the social transition into

higher education? You can shout out. You’ve been listening, good. What percentage of

students think about leaving higher education? I mean, a number of students this morning

talked about their perhaps wrong course choice or issues. Come on, how many? I’m a bit deaf,

you have to shout.

Audience: 40%

Liz Thomas: 40%. I need to gauge your optimism this morning.

Audience: 30%.

Liz Thomas: 30%. More optimism over this side of the room.

Audience: Sixty.

Liz Thomas: Sixty? Well, in some of the work that we were involved in, between about 33 and

42% said they’d thought about leaving, and that kind of mirrors other surveys in the sector

as well. And when are students most likely to consider leaving? First six weeks? After

Christmas? When they’ve gone home and then they have to come back to that sort of

scary place where they might have not done all the reading they planned to do to catch

up over Christmas. And during the first semester, as you say. And why do students think

about leaving? I am a bit deaf, honestly.

Audience: Homesickness.

Liz Thomas: Homesickness. What else?

Audience: Finance.

Liz Thomas: Finance.

Audience: Feeling overwhelmed.

Liz Thomas: Feeling overwhelmed.

Audience: Not fitting in.

Liz Thomas: Not fitting in.

Audience: Unhappy about their course.

Liz Thomas: Yep. Sorry?

Audience: Disillusioned.

Liz Thomas: Disillusioned. You’re feeling negative, you lot, aren’t you? Most students have

more than one reason. I think the average is 2.6 or something like that. So it’s not about

a simple answer. The top three reasons are academic issues. Which is interesting,

because they weren’t concerned about it when they started. Feelings of isolation and not

fitting in. And concerns about achieving their future aspirations about what’s the point of

this and how does it allow me to get there? Which is perhaps some of that disillusionment.

The majority of those students don’t actually leave, but it is important to think about the

fact that a lot of students coming in are having these kind of wobbles, which suggests that

actually transitioning into higher education is difficult.

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<next slide 9.54>

But it’s also difficult in terms of the other outcomes and transitions that need to take you

forward. And I just want to think briefly about the differential outcomes for students from

different groups. So you mentioned earlier that the institutional strategy is looking at students

from diverse backgrounds. So again I’m sure you’ll be able to do this, are women or men most

likely to gain a good degree, which is here defined as a first or upper second?

Audience: Women.

Liz Thomas: Women, you’re very confident. Are men or women more likely to progress to

postgraduate taught and postgraduate research courses?

Audience: Women.

Liz Thomas: What did you say sorry? Men? Yep. You’re well informed as well. Are BME or

white students more likely to progress to a postgraduate taught program? White?

Audience: What’s BME?

Liz Thomas: Black and minority ethnic, sorry. But white students are more likely to progress

to a postgraduate research program. Which students are more likely to have a graduate

job or be in employment after studying? After graduation. White, black, Chinese or other

Asian?

Audience: White.

Liz Thomas: Someone had the right answer. It’s white. And I think all of that shows to the fact

that there are different outcomes that are associated or predominant in different groups

of our students. And that points more to the need to support the different transitions, both

into and, crucially, out of higher education and into employment in postgraduate study.

And to think about those trends and the extent to which we’re influencing and shaping

them.

<next slide 11.45>

I haven’t got very long. I want to talk about the What Works program. I’m really conscious that

a lot of this I’ve talked about already so I’ll skip through some of this quite quickly. There’s a

research report which is available, and also I’m really happy to make the slides available

afterwards because I think there are some other things we can move onto towards the end.

<next slide 12.05>

But this was a study that was about collecting evidence about how to improve both retention

but also success in higher education. And I think it was important that out of these kind of

diverse project using diverse methodologies a very strong message emerged that at the heart

of student retention success is a strong sense of belonging for students, and that this is most

effectively generated through academic engagement. So the curriculum is the one thing that

all students have in common.

So some students live in student accommodation, and that helps them to integrate into their

educational experience, but other students are living at home and commuting into campus.

Some students have time on campus to get involved in societies while other students have

less time to do that, they’ve got family or other commitments. So the academic, the curriculum,

is the place where we can reach all students, and that very much came through the findings

of this work that we need to use our learning and teaching and work through that and to

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connect up with professional services in the social sphere of the institution. So the key

concepts that emerge from this work, which are probably quite well known, are around this

idea of belonging and engagement. And belonging we found is the result of things like

supporting peer relationships. And you’ll note the number of times that students here were

talking about connections with peers and friends and other students. They also talked about

interaction with staff. And they were really full of praise for the personal tutoring system, but

also the need for continuity and amore time to engage with their personal tutors. And that’s

really connected to this issue about interaction between staff and students, and having that

opportunity to have one to one or small group conversations with members of academic staff.

Belonging also comes about developing knowledge, confidence, and identity as successful

learners. And part of that is about our responsibility as institutions to develop that capacity.

And finally, that engagement comes from, and belonging comes from having an experience

which is relevant to current interests and future goals. And that seems to be becoming

increasingly important that students are very focused on education as a journey to somewhere

rather than just in an end in itself. And you might want to question whether such an

instrumental approach is right but it’s kind of what we’re hearing when we talk to students. So

this is then summarised in the diagram, which all I’m going to say here is that those three

circles of the academic sphere, the professional service, and the social sphere were kind of

equal size when we started off on the analysis, that there were interventions taking place in

different parts of the institution. Your outreach work which is connected, your pre-entry work,

which is connected to the academic sphere is really important. So students want to see the

relevance of the outreach work or the pre-entry intervention to what they’re coming to study.

They want to meet students on their program of study. They want to be making those

connections. They want to have academic development services which are relevant to their

discipline of study. Students in STEM subjects, in particular, are quite cynical of the value of

centrally provided services, for example. Students want to make friends. Some of them are

able to make them through clubs and societies and accommodation. Some of them need to

make friends through their learning experience.

I’ll just draw attention to those last steps, sort of outer circle there which hopefully I’ll have time

to go back to, come back to at the end of this talk. But the idea that much of this places the

change on the learning experience which connects to what we as academic members of staff

have to do, but there are institutional responsibilities that facilitate and enable staff to take on

those roles. So that leads to issues around staff capacity and staff capacity building. And

something that’s emerged in some current work is very much the idea that if staff don’t feel

like they belong to institutions it’s much more difficult for them to engage students and help

them to belong. And that perhaps has issue perhaps for institutions that make a lot of use of

part time and associate tutors and that sort of thing.

<next slide 16.12>

So what we found at the end of this study was that there wasn’t a silver bullet, there wasn’t a

single solution that says “if you just do this, all your problems will be solved.” And this was

primarily about first year transition, but I think it’s probably true at all the transitions throughout

the experience, that there’s not one thing that makes a difference. But what we were able to

do was to identify those principles or characteristics of things that made a difference. So things

were mainstream and targeted at all students. No one wants to have “strange person” stamped

on their forehead and be siphoned off into the special unit for people who are not quite fitting

in or might be at risk of withdrawing or whatever. So things need to be mainstream.

We also have to be proactive about the services that we’re offering, and we need to make it

relevant to students. I think those things go together. Often students don’t understand why

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we’re doing the things we’re doing. It was interesting, the students were talking about some of

the additional information they would have liked pre-entry. My guess is maybe they’re very

good students but 90% of them wouldn’t have read or taken in that information because at

that point it wasn’t relevant to them. So we have to think about making things well-timed and

using appropriate media. How we actually enable people to have that information when they

need it and not perhaps overwhelm students at the beginning, because that also came out

and was captured on Twitter. Very much the emphasis on collaboration, about doing things

together, and that helps students to belong.

But also this needs to be underpinned by monitoring. We do have to know which students are

not engaging, which students are not participating, and so we can then base our judgements

of students at risk, not what they come in with but how they behave and how they perform

once they’re in the institution. And I think that’s a much more inclusive approach than kind of

separating people into sheep and goats on entry and then targeting them in that way.

<next slide 18.10>

I just want to tell you, just to point out the need, that we do need to engage students. You can

read that for yourself. But students don’t always do what we expect them to do.

<next slide 18.22>

I was quite surprised by stuff like counselling. And I like the fact that she says it’s not very well

advertised. And this student goes on to say we should make more use of noticeboards. I think

we think that everything’s about electronic media and things but we do need to find ways to

engage students so that they understand what we’re doing and why we’re making the

opportunities available.

<next slide 18.47>

There’s a few examples here of practice, which I will just provide an overview of. Sometimes

I’ve talked them through in more detail, I’m happy to do it subsequently, I’m here all day, but I

think some of you will have heard them before. Hang on, I missed a bit, sorry. What I wanted

you to do, on your table there are some peachy orangey apricot coloured sheets of paper.

And there are about eight different stories around the room about students’ experience in

higher education. Just spend a few minutes to read the story, and then just before I talk about

the examples, just talk to each other about the reasons why that student was unhappy or

thought about leaving or indeed left higher education.

Thank you, thank you very much. I’ll take that as a sign that you all really engaged in that

activity. Of course, it may just be that there were lots of other things to talk about. But in the

interests of time I think we need to move on. Can you keep those thoughts about student

experience in your mind, or indeed other students that you’ve been working with recently, or

indeed your own experiences as we just talk through some of the examples.

<next slide 20.09>

So this is an induction activity, and without going into the detail of it, the idea is to put students

into groups using a semi-structured approach in their first week of teaching, and then these

groups that they then study with during semester one. And so it’s a kind of example that

conforms to the principles or characteristics of effective interventions that I kind of outlined

before.

The asterisks suggest that perhaps there’s not enough information to make a judgement about

it so in this case I don’t know how students who didn’t participate in the activity were followed

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up and supported to integrate. But the idea was that they created these groups and it was a

semi-structured approach. So the idea was to kind of encourage students to move out of their

comfort zone so they wouldn’t just all sit together with students who were like them, but they

would mix with other students. So for example they might have had to include a mix of

international and male and female students or that sort of thing. But they also had these t-

shirts and they used the t-shirts to kind of… they had some instructions to describe some

things about themselves. So the idea was you could find people who had something in

common with you but you couldn’t just sit with people who were the same. So you kind of

avoid the idea of one group of Chinese students, one group of all the women perhaps

congregating together, and so on and so forth, because this was an Engineering programme.

And then they used these groups for learning and teaching. And they kind of looked at the

results of this by using surveys and focus groups with students and the analysis of the

institutional data.

I think it was quite revealing that the groups continued to work and socialise together one year

on in quite a large extent, so 58% of students reported that. And they’d only had to work

together for these assessments for the first semester, so those kind of friendships you make

through your course are quite powerful in terms of helping you to move on.

It was an opportunity to get to know a member of staff because it was facilitated by quite a

charismatic member of the teaching staff, a core member of the teaching team. It was also an

opportunity for the students not just to get to know each other but 44% of students reported

receiving help from each other. And some of the students were struggling with things to do

with some of the programming, and in the qualitative work they talk about how they kind of

figured it out together. Because you’ve got this group of people from your class, you sit

together and you figure it out, because no one actually knew how to do it. So you kind of figure

it out together. And it was relevant to where they were going in the future, they could see the

relevance of it, partly because it was part of their core curriculum, it wasn’t an optional add-on

extra that they had to go and get involved in. It was part of their learning and teaching. But it’s

also relevant to things like engineering employment when you have to work in teams and so

on and so forth.

But perhaps the most interesting figure that comes out of this evaluation is that 81% of

students said they always or mostly felt like they belonged to their program of study. And also

quite impressively that the retention rates improved year on year from about 85 to 94%. They

also improved compared to other engineering schools. I think there were five engineering

schools in the same institution and two of them were involved in this program in creating

groups for studying, and those two improved significantly while the other three remained the

same. So there’s a number of indicators that this was impacting on the student experience

and their transition into higher education.

<next slide 23.34>

And the student quotes are always nice to read. The idea that you wouldn’t know how else to

make friends if you didn’t have these design groups and things like that. But I’m not going to

read those now because we kind of need to move through.

<next slide 23.52>

The second example is perhaps similar, about problem-based learning in groups, and it was

in a psychology course. I think the thing I want to draw out of this is that they actually used a

coaching model to help develop students’ capacity to engage.

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So I think some students find it more difficult than others to get involved in group activities. So

the staff time was not about teaching from the front but was about working with the groups

and helping them to work through problems of working together as a group. And again the

students said that it created a sense of belonging and it made an impact on their retention

rates. But also opportunities to make friends and get to know staff and so on and so forth. And

again the students talk about the fact that they made friends through their seminars. And also

they talked about the advantages of group learning, that you can bring things that you’re

interested in to that learning experience and then you can find out things from other people

that you’ve never heard of. And that can be really important for students coming from different

contexts and backgrounds where sometimes a curriculum feels quite narrow, quite alien if you

come from a different background. Certainly some of the work with black and minority ethnic

students has revealed that students feel it’s a very white curriculum or a very Western

curriculum, but if you’re allowing students to bring in their own experiences or their own

materials then that allows it to become more diverse.

<next slide 25.14>

But I just wanted to think beyond that initial transition to some of the issues to do with

independent learning, and we’ve just completed some work for the Higher Education Academy

looking at directed independent learning. And it’s interesting to note that the transition to

independent learning perhaps reflects many of the challenges about the transition to learning

in higher education more generally. And the NUS survey from 2012 said that the majority of

students do not feel adequately supported with their independent learning. So we expect them

to do this thing called independent learning but if you talk to staff they’re not actually always

giving very articulate or clear definitions of what this means. And students are certainly not

clear of what is expected of them. And I think I kind of like this comment from Veterinary

Science discipline that says “we have students who have been highly successful in this

system” about A-levels predominantly. “They have learned how to learn but they have to learn

how to learn differently, rather than just studying harder, they have to study differently and

unfortunately some of them don’t learn until they fail and it’s a hard lesson for them to learn.”

So these are the top achieving students coming in with A grades, and they don’t get the results

they expect, they’re suddenly not the best in the class. And so they carry on doing more and

more of what they were doing before, but that isn’t actually what we’re asking them to do and

it takes academic failure sometimes before they understand it’s about doing things differently.

A bit like doing the maths differently, it’s not about trying to get the answer right in the way you

did it before, it’s about doing it differently. And clearly it seems to me that we need to be

reconceptualising independent learning to think about students coming in as more dependent

learners and aiming to be fully independent by the time they complete their undergraduate

education rather than assuming they come in and immediately transform themselves into

independent learners.

And we did some work with staff about how they were supporting students to be effective

independent learners, and I think some of these examples are quite interesting and

demonstrate that need for guidance and support. And they can be contrasted with other places

that said “I just don’t get it, the students don’t know what to do. When I was an undergraduate

I just had to go off and do it.” So this is a comment from English and Critical Theory. “If there

are certain passages that bewilder you in the reading…” we’ve all seen that in academic

journal articles, haven’t we? “use the diary to analyse the sentence piece by piece trying to

get it into your own words. Use the diary to try out your ideas. It is a safe place…” and that’s

really important, “where we don’t need to see perfection. What we want to see is thought

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processes that you personally go through when you face that particular passage. We strongly

recommend you keep a reading diary for all your reading on your module.”

And I think that’s a really interesting example of using a reading diary, and quite clear

instructions to students about how to start engaging with more difficult reading in a field where

other students were kind of abandoned and left to it and staff couldn’t quite understand why

they weren’t getting it.

<next slide 28.28>

This has got very compressed, sorry.

What we found is that effective independent learning approaches have to provide a clear

structure of what it is you want students to do and guidance about what’s required. Simply

asking students to reflect or to read more widely or to problem solve doesn’t really help them

to do it. But they also need that safe space to learn. It’s a place about finding out things and

doing things differently. This epistemological and ontological transition. But they need support

from staff and the opportunity to check that they’re on the right lines, particularly students who

lack confidence, they want to know they’re doing it right otherwise they’re investing all this

time in doing something that they think might be wrong, and that makes them reluctant to do

it. They seem to value opportunities for peer support, but not if it’s assessed. There’s a bit anti-

group assessment move or feeling amongst students. Guidance on how to be reflective and

to better understand the learning process, and support with specific things, sometimes we

expect them to do it through ICT, and many students that’s not so easy to do. And we need to

be underpinning it by monitoring. And also this idea that a staged or scaffolded approach

enables students to move from being dependent learners to more autonomous by the end of

their education.

But I think this independent learning is clearly essential to that transition to employment and

postgraduate study. And here’s a couple of different quotes about self-managed learning, I

think, observed and experience personally builds a confidence and an interest in learning,

whatever context you are. Some students have appreciated this point and its importance, then

the module would have been more worthwhile. And I think for them it will be life-changing. But

perhaps more grounded, the skills learned here are key to any future career and they provide

a practical side to the course which is otherwise absent. And these examples are really

interesting because they’re what engage students. They found them really motivating if they

could start to connect the theory to the real world and to the places they wanted to go which

connect back to that idea about belonging being related to current interest and future

aspirations.

And there’s another example from psychology and so on. And here’s an example from history.

I think sometimes some subject areas there seems to be feeling that it’s harder to make it

more applied in this sort of way. But the making digital history project has involved getting

students to produce online resources that teach others about the work they’ve been doing in

the curriculum and it’s been assessed across all levels and in different types of modules

through collaborative and individual work, and that’s really key. As I say, the students don’t

really like the collaborative assessment as a general rule. And the key aim is to shift students

from consumers to active producers of historical knowledge.

So what I’ve done there is really, really quickly run through two research projects, both the

What Works and the independent learning. And what I think I would like you to take away, not

to do as an activity now, is to think of the ways in which you’ve helped students to make an

effective transition either into or from any phase of higher education and to think to which it

resonates with both the principles from the What Works program, the examples from that

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program, and then the examples from the independent learning. And then to think whether

any of those approaches would have helped that student that you were analysing and

discussing earlier. And I’m only going to give you a minute just to think about that because we

kind of need to finish. Just to reflect on that.

So in conclusion I have argued that learning and teaching plays a pivotal role in supporting

students with transitions into and through higher education. This includes providing

information to help ensure good decision making, informing expectations to improve a fit with

reality, developing academic skills to enhance the academic transition, building social

networks in relation to promote integration with both peers and staff, and nurturing confidence,

engagement, and belonging to improve retention and success. But that does involve us

making changes at the institutional level. We can’t do it on our own as academics. And I think

it’s quite hard to think about those strategic enablers. And as the institution moves forward

with its approach to transition I think that becomes important.

Senior management commitment is absolutely vital, so it’s great to see you staying all day,

Ian. I went to one learning and teaching conference, the vice-chancellor came in and said how

unimportant learning and teaching was, and then left. It was the most strange conference. All

I can say is he was retiring. Oh, he also spent a bit of time slagging off the Higher Education

Academy. But a very odd conference. But the point is senior management commitment is

absolutely vital because if you don’t see that it’s important in your institution then we’ve all got

many, many other things to be working on so we’ll actually put our energy and concern

elsewhere.

But equally this has to be a priority for all staff, we have to recognise it’s not just a job of the

widening participation office or the student support services or whatever, it’s something that

we all have a commitment to do to enable students to make that transition. Because it might

be you that students bump into in the corridor, not the “right person.” And it’s certainly you that

they’re going to be coming to your lectures or teaching sessions. We then have to think about

how we develop staff capacity, and that includes workload allocation models and those sorts

of things. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment around implementing change, and some

staff are really cramming it in on top of everything else and I think we have to think very

seriously about whether that’s the appropriate way as an institution to implement the sorts of

changes that we want to see.

We also have to think about student capacity. Some students find it much easier than others

to engage so how do we enable them to understand the value of engagement, thinking of

those comments about “well, I didn’t go to induction because it was a bit crap, really.” So how

do we get them to understand it but also to give them the skills to enable them to engage?

And that’s something we have to be thinking about as an institution.

We need good institutional data, though, and that’s something that’s coming out very much in

the second phase of the What Works program. The institutional data is there but it’s often not

used. It’s often eighteen months out of date by the time you actually get to see it, whereas we

need to be using that to be working with and helping students to engage and participate and

make the most of their experience and maximise their success. And that connects with this

issue about monitoring student behaviour rather than identifying students at risk because of

where they’ve come from or what they’ve come in with or whatever.

And crucially I think we need to work in partnership with staff and students. It’s not about staff

doing it to students or senior management doing it to staff or whatever or students being left

to do it on their own, it’s about all of us working together and taking responsibility for change

and making transition and all that that means in terms of putting students perhaps in the centre

11

of their institution and connected with the academic staff, with peers, with professional

services, and making that at the heart of the work that we do.

<next slide 35.25>

So thank you very much, I think I’ve probably kept to time. And I’m happy, we’ve got about

five minutes for questions. Thank you.

Does anyone want to ask a question or do you want to…? Stand in silence. My children came

to an academic conference with me last week and I booked them into childcare but they

decided they’d come and watch mum instead, and they judged me by the number of questions

that I got.

<<Audience – laugh>>

Host – Ian Pirie: So we’d better ask some questions… Tanya?

Tanya: Thank you very much for that, it was a fantastic talk and it’s great to see that you’ve

had Edinburgh students as partners. And I was just wondering, I tweeted the question earlier,

but that you and Professor Baxter-Magolda from the US and George Kuh have all talked about

the need for student engagement and having students not in lectures, basically, to prevent

more discussions, more contact between staff and students and understanding each other

and not feeling so isolated in lectures. So obviously there are research implications to having

smaller class sizes, but I was wondering what you could say to that and how we could promote

smaller classes to promote more collaboration between students.

Liz Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I think that smaller class sizes are something that we would

all aspire to but are not a reality in many academic areas in many institutions. I think we do

need to think about how we do use the staff resource that we’ve got so, for example, in the

University of Huddersfield, in the Business School, in the first year of the Business School

programme, which was quite a large programme, they reorganised the existing staff resource

away from lectures and seminars into workshops. And so they used the same amount of staff

resource and it was much more engaging and much more effective than the other intervention

which was about additional study skill support sessions, which the students who most needed

it didn’t attend. So I think we need to be thinking about that.

But I think we also need to think about how we use our large lecture time. So what I’ve tried

to do today is say you don’t have to not talk to each other just because you’re in a big room

and there’s quite a lot of you, because I’d normally do this and there’s lots of people sitting in

rows. It’s not ideal but you can at least have conversations. If we’d had more time we could

have developed each of those activities further. And I think we do need to be thinking about

whether talking at people is the best way of delivering information. I’ve done variations of this

kind of presentation before, so could we use that through lecture capture, and then discuss it

more?

So it’s not easy but I think we need to think those things through in our own academic context

that we’re working to, and involve students in those conversations to find good solutions.

Host - Ian Pirie: Okay. Probably time for one more question.

Audience Member: Excellent. That was a fascinating talk. I agree with so much of it, and one

part that I feel slightly more ambivalent about is the idea of monitoring students and we’re very

much in the middle of an exercise on it in Edinburgh. And we’re very much torn, really, between

the opportunity that we have to monitor students and tell them if they’re failing or at risk of

failing, and presenting to students the actual information allowing them to make their

12

conclusion; if it’s justified. And I wondered if you could unpack that and in your interaction with

engineering you were suggesting that you’ve done a bit more?

Liz Thomas: Yeah. I think a lot of academic institutions or academics and colleagues within

institutions feel uncomfortable of ambivalent about monitoring. And I think it depends what we

mean by that.

So the most obvious thing is attendance monitoring and everyone swipes in and you kind of

have a three strikes and you’re out sort of policy. But I think what we’ve been looking at is a

basket of indicators and much more diagnostic in terms of “oh, is there something happening

here that we should be aware of and that we could actually use to make contact with the

student?” rather than in a sort of punishment or punitive kind of way.

And my husband, who studied as a mature student, is very quick to knock me back on these

sorts of issues, he’s an academic as well, and he would say “I didn’t want to do all those things.

Many of those things you talked about, I wouldn’t have wanted to engage in.” And I think we

have to recognise that people engage in their learning in quite different ways and so therefore

we do need those range of indicators. So for some people it’s about using the library. For

some people it’s about studying online. For some people it’s attending lectures. Some people

it’s working together with peers. And that’s why we need to have this range of things that gives

a sense of “are they never on campus or are they just doing things in a different way to perhaps

what would suit me as a learner?” And so I think it’s about a sensitive use of a range of data

and trying to make it fit with your context. But I do feel strongly that students value that sense

that someone’s keeping an eye out for them. It’s a hard one, though. There’s not a straight

forward solution. But I think you get the best results with monitoring.

Host – Ian Pirie: Okay, I think on that note I would like to thank Liz formally for an excellent

keynote this morning session. Thank you.

Liz Thomas: Thank you.

<<Audience applause>>

Host – Ian Pirie: Okay, we now move into a thirty minute networking and coffee and tea break.

We’ll see you back here at eleven thirty. Thank you.

***end of transcription***