That's it, folks!

I'm not going to continue with this blog but hope to keep my leisure one going, if somewhat intermittently, during the rest of the trip: http://ranald-nz2007leisure.blogspot.com/

The Final Day

Well, my four weeks here at the University of Otago are final up and the time has flown by. I've not posted much as (a) I've been very busy and (b) I get the sense that I'm writing into a void and no one is reading!

So, what has kept me so busy since my last posting? - workshops, seminars, meetings and, this Wednesday, my keynote lecture - "A sustainable future for HE: an exploration of the complex and changing world of learning". Given that I had spent so much time thinking and talking about the issues I wanted to cover in the lecture I almost found I'd lost interest or was over-familiar with it by the time I had to deliver it.

After the lecture we went to the High Tide restaurant whose address is Waterfront, which it is, but is in the middle of an industrial estate. Strange location but very good meal. There were wry smiles when I ordered muttonbird as my first course. I explained I didn't know what it was so was going to give it a try. It was HORRIBLE! It's a seabird and very fatty - I've tried it once but never again. The rest of the meal was excellent as was the company.

On Tuesday I had a meeting with Syd King from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and Hilary Branthwaite from the Tertiary education Commission, We were also joined by Bill Rickarts from Alverno College in the US who I was due to meet the following day anyway. I think Alison had mentioned my named to Hilary and, though I kept saying on the phone that I wasn't sure I was the person they wanted to speak to, Bill insisted that they would fly down from Wellington to talk to me. We had a fascinating couple of hours thinking about how best to quality assure/enhance in a system that is undergoing massive change and includes all post-16 providers.

Throughout my four weeks here I have also sat in on Tony's Qualitative Research Methods course which has proved to be very useful to me and got me reading in some new areas. There are only two staff taking the course but that means they have to do teh reading and get their ideas together.

I've a lot to think about and reflect on but I am leaving with a much clearer idea about what the focus of learning and teaching should be about - enquiry (or is it inquiry?). This forms one of the links between research and teaching through to learning and I'll write some of this up when I get back. My discussions with Tony about the nature and purposes of both academic development and higher education have been very stimulating. I'm also even more convinced about the worthlessness of the student evaluations that most people use - but that's a another story.

I've enjoyed and valued my time here in HEDC at the University of Otago and have made many useful contacts which I hope will continue through writing, research and at conferences.

Meeting in Christchurch

After the weekend with Alison Holmes in Christchurch I stayed on for a meeting at Canterbury University of the project team for which I am an external 'critical friend'. The project has a snappy title: "Unlocking Student Learning: the impact of Teaching and Learning Initiatives (TLEIs) on First Year University Students" and is funded by the New Zealand Teaching and Learning Research Initiative. I wrote all about this in last year's blog - http://ranaldnz.blogspot.com/ - when I also visited the project at Massey University in Palmerston North.

On this occasion I was to facilitate their session using Open Space Technology and, so far as I can judge from their comments, the participants found it useful.

Those there included Lorraine Stephani (ex Strathclyde University now University of Auckland), Tom Angelo (ex-US, now Victoria University, Wellington), Kogi Naidoo and Gordon Suddaby from Massey, Neil Haigh (Auckland University of Technology), Sarah Stein (Otago), Billy O'Steen (Canterbury) and Tony Barrett (Lincoln University). I know many of the people very well from previous visits and ICED or SEDA Conferences.

In the photo, taken at Christchurch Airport as we waited for flights back to our various destinations are, from left to right, Lorraine, Sarah, Neil, Kogi, Tom, me and Gordon (kneeling).

Everyone flies everywhere in New Zealand as there are virtually no trains and the roads are slow. This means that everyone has lots of airmiles so we could use the Business Lounge at the airport - very civilised!

A seminar on institutional processes

This morning I had a meeting with Sarah Carr, Head of the Quality Advancement Office - now there's an interesting term. We had an useful discussion about their processes and about the nature of quality assurance, enhancement and advancement.

Sarah then cam with some of her colleagues to my seminar entitled Institutional processes: enablers or inhibitors to change? I described the Institutional Processes SIG, some activities I had engaged in such as changing the module descriptor to remove the need for minor modifications and what we have done around plagiarism. My handout contained some bits from Richard Seel on emergence which cause some interest and I circulated further papers, including Paul Tosey's Teaching at the Edge of Chaos.

The handout also included the following random thoughts around how policy, strategy and processes to do with learning and teaching interface:

My ideal:

• People have freedom to act as they think appropriate
• There are agreed loose boundaries that encourage collegial action
• And everything enhances student learning: “I’m helping to put a man on the moon”
• Unintended consequences may be enriching rather than be assumed to be detrimental
• Risk-taking is encouraged (and rewarded)
• Individuals should be accountable for their actions but not in a ‘one size fits all’ way as there are distinct subject/disciplinary/professional cultures which are more often than not more important to the individual academic than the University’s or Ministry of Education’s views or policies
• The focus of quality assurance and enhancement should be on trust, taking responsibility, having pride in our actions, and acting professionally otherwise we promote a compliance culture
• Need to ensure processes, systems and regulations enable educational change and enhance the learning experience

“It’s not all about doing things better. We should look to do better things”

(Lewis Elton)

Lewis has used variants of this quote many times but it's still a very challenging statement.

My first workshop

Well, I've just finished my first workshop on "Assessment for learning: are our practices fit for purpose?" I made a lot of references to FAST and TALI, using Graham Gibbs' paper from Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Issue 1, 2004-05).

It was interesting working in such a different context with some very large classes, only a certain number of students being allowed to progress to the second year (norm referencing to the fore) and the exam very much the major assessment instrument. However, inevitably those who came to the workshop were prepared to try new things - as at SHU it's those who don't come who may be problematic and why we increasingly need to work at a Subject Group level if we want to bring about real, deep change to practices.

I again posed the three questions I've been using at SHU and elsewhere quite a lot recently:

1. Could you have a meeting about learning and teaching and not mention 'assessment', not because it wasn't being considered, but because the students were taking responsibility for demonstrating their learning - what, how well, what needed further work, etc. Too often 'assessment' is seen as something done to students by staff rather than a way of genuinely exploring student learning
2. Could you set an exam where students didn't have to do any revision in the traditional sense. Rather, they prepared by making sense of the materials they had been working with, gathered additional data/ideas and perhaps carried out a preliminary group activity
3. Have an exam where students spent half their time thinking, making sense, engaging in critical thinking, problem-solving, being creative and working with new material, etc. and only half their time (if that) writing anything. Use computers to test the factual knowledge and exams - to the extent that the system still requires them - to test higher order learning. And rather than Bloom I would prefer to use the SOLO taxonomy (see Biggs) - again, to the extent that we want to use any taxonomy at all.

I'm also working in a much less structured way in workshops to present more of a challenge to myself. So, with a clear title, a few handouts and finding out the interests and needs of the participants it was possible to move in a variety of ways to the identified general outcomes. I made the comparison with orienteering where I know I have to get to the next control but there are a variety of ways of getting there and route choice needs to balance with speed to be most effective.

I also don't use 'happy sheet' evaluations but two post-its - on one they write what was 'good' and on the other what they want 'more of'. One of the 'goods' was 'responsive style, no set agenda - great' much like the feedback I received from ACES when we used Open Space Technology on their LTA Co-ordinators Retreat.

This open, facilitative approach is more risky but has much more meaning for the participants as it addresses their needs rather than our agenda. However, there are still some who just want to be given 'the answer' or 'how to do it' - a bit like students really!

Some more reading

Ive also been reading a lot of stuff to do with the relationship between research and teaching and their relationships with learning and scholarship. There's a particularly nice one by Graham Badley (2002): "A really useful link between teaching and research", Teaching in Higher Education, 7, 4 as well as chapters by Lewis Elton and Stephen Rowland in the various books I'm currently reading.

Putting Graham's name into Google Scholar I came up with another couple of fascinating articles:

1. "Towards a pragmatic scholarship of academic development", Quality Assurance in Education, 9, 3, 2001
2. "Integrating culture and higher education: a pragmatist approach", European Educational Research Journal, 2, 4, 2003

This showed me it's often worth just following up an article by an author to see where else it takes you. Graham's particularly interesting as much of his writing has been since he retired as Director of the University Centre for Learning and Teaching at what is now Anglia Ruskin University. He writes in an electic style about a range of topics which should interest us all.

Similarly, I've been following up on Ron Barnett's writing and re-found "Learning for an unknown future", Higher Education Research and Development, 23, 3 2004. This could perhaps form the basis of a Thursday morning seminar in the LTI as, despite its quite challenging language, the ideas are really fundamental to our views about curriculum design and pedagogy. There's a particularly useful diagram on pedagogical options which has two axes - educational development/educational transformation and low risk/high risk. The educational transformation/high risk quadrant presents the university with real issues about the nature of the curriculum (not least in relation to accreditation and professional bodies) and the pedagogies used.

Next on my pile is another Ron Barnett article: Coate, K, Barnett, R & Williams, G: "Relationships between teaching and research in Higher Education in England", Higher Education Quarterly, 55, 2, 2001.

What all this reading has also reminded me is that, whilst I do it regularly, I'm not sure how common place it is for us to scan the journals pages on the LITS catalogue and share interesting articles with each other. We perhaps need to develop some annotated bibliographies around some major topics to do with pedagogy, research, scholarship, etc.

Another useful activity would be for us to share some of the literatures used in the Academic Practice and Academic Innovations teams. I suspect that we might see a greater range of authors and countries coming from AI as I'm not sure that in AP there's not enough use made of the North American literature. The same probably goes for journals as well. Any comments?

Is anyone out there and reading (he writes in a somewhat plaintive 'voice')?

First couple of days

I'm slowly getting over the jetlag and am beginning to settle in at the University. I'm doing quite a lot of reading, thinking and talking about higher education and academic development. Currently reading 'Reshaping the University: new relationships between research, scholarship and teaching' (2005) edited by Ron Barnett and 'The Enquiring University' (2006) by Stephen Rowland.

Both have much to provoke thought. In particular, I'm interested in what it means to be an 'academic' academic developer, i.e. what are the activities we should engage in, the values to hold and the skills/knowledge we should have to justify being thought of as 'proper' academics?

My discussions with Tony Harland are proving very fruitful and are helping me to focus in on some ideas around the purposes of higher education, particularly the move to mass HE and the differences between research-intensive universities and those such as SHU.