VP Education kicks off teaching consultations

Imperial launched its College-wide consultation on the Learning and Teaching Strategy this Wednesday with a Town Hall meeting which saw Vice-Provost of Education, Simone Buitendijk, address the issues raised by Imperial’s disappointing NSS scores. “All of us know that student experience isn’t necessarily one-on-one the best way for measuring teaching quality, but at the same time it is important for being judged on it. If you see similar categories year after year after year there are things you need to pay attention to.” said Buitendijk.

Indeed, Imperial College has consistently done poorly when it comes to the student experience and this year Imperial dropped from number ten to 21 out of 24 Russell Group universities. Many of the main issues that plague student satisfaction at Imperial are familiar to most students and include density of curriculum, a stressful assessment process and often poor-quality feedback that doesn’t allow time for reflection or improvement. However, Buitendijk also pointed out the inconsistency of student satisfaction across departments, which only exacerbates the feeling of discontent.

“Some students are absolutely happy with the teaching they’re getting. They love their teachers, they rave about the stellar researchers that teach them and how wonderful that is and other students will have exactly opposite opinions. Some students are completely crazy about their personal tutor and say that person really saved their academic experience and others say [they] really lost out in the lottery for a good personal tutor. They talk to each other in halls, they talk to students from other universities and if we can’t explain why some students have a really good experience and others don’t that really leads to disgruntlement. I think we see some of that in the NSS,” said Buitendijk.

The strategy so far appears to focus on a few key points. Firstly, emphasis is put on identifying the pockets of good practice across various departments, collecting them and implementing them at a College-wide level. Another area of focus is curriculum assessment. Buitendijk stressed the importance of creating “a curriculum that goes beyond facts”, in an effort to equip students with transferable skills for “jobs that don’t even exist yet”. Finally there will be a push to restructure teaching and learning by making research-backed changes that will elevate teaching to match the level of the research undertaken at Imperial. To achieve these goals, there are long-term plans to not only develop education units that research and assess Imperial’s teaching strategies, but to eventually create “central units within faculties”. “Ideally they’ll be departments with professors and chairs, but it’s a budding field,” said the Vice-Provost. “... it’s a long term goal that we can keep in mind, that would help in raising teaching to the same level and prestige as research.”

The Town Hall Meeting also gave staff the opportunity to share their thoughts with College and Union representatives through real time polling and a panel discussion. During the discussion, several staff members voiced their concerns. Sam Cooper, an Imperial graduate and currently an Earth Science & Engineering research associate, pointed out that the problems the NSS scores have highlighted are widely known. “We know that class interaction has been the way to go for a very long time... It’s not as if we just found out how teaching should be done. We’ve known this for a long time,” said Cooper. “The academics on the whole are reluctant to implement it because it’s a lot of work... I think it’s all very well suggesting what we should do, but how do you go about persuading difficult-to-herd academics to bother put in the actual time?”

The Vice-Provost’s response indicated that financial incentives and training would be used to promote these changes. “...The teachers who are going to do this will get the support to take the time out of other things. The researchers will find this very scary because it is scary to step into something totally new, especially if you have little time for doing it anyway. They need to get the proper support, teaching fellows will have to be involved and that will take energy, manpower, and ultimately budget.”

Concerns were also raised about the effects that such radical restructuring might have on SOLE scores. As some evidence exists suggesting that SOLE rewards enthusiastic lecturing often to the detriment of content, some staff voiced their concerns over scoring poorly at SOLE if they were to try innovative teaching approaches. felix also raised concerns about putting too much pressure on many already over-worked Imperial academics. Imperial can be a very high pressure environment, not only for students but also for researchers. We raised questions such as: ‘Does the new strategy have mechanisms in place that will look into the welfare of Imperial researchers and lecturers?’, ‘If someone is not necessarily very good at lecturing, will that have an impact on their career?’, and ‘How is College looking into how this will affect staff?’

College and Union representatives replied reassuringly. “It’s important to create a safe space during this exercise and maybe let go of SOLE scores for a while, because those are the kinds of things that will keep people behind”, said Buitendijk. When asked about the consequences on staff careers in the case of failure to embrace the new teaching framework, it was made clear that the new strategy was more about the carrot than the stick.

Yet these changes might have to progress faster than some might feel comfortable with. With higher education getting marketised and becoming more of a product, especially in the wake of a post-Brexit Britain, improving teaching standards will become a marketing priority. At the moment, the discrepancy between teaching and research is a problem: “Whenever we come to try and find the marketing messages around the college, it is very much centred around our research expertise and there’s very little that we can actually say about our teaching,” said a marketing staff member, suggesting Imperial should take steps to elevate teaching to the level of the research undertaken.

“We’re going to do that, once we have something to be proud of,” replied Buitendijk. “I think now it’s a little tricky, especially with the NSS results, but as soon as we feel we have something to show for it, definitely.”