This morning I spoke to ABC 666 local radio about the changes to course delivery in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Here is a transcipt of the interview with Genevieve Jacobs.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: If you’ve completed a tertiary degree, where do you think you did most of your learning? Was it in your lectures? In your tutorials? Close up? At a distance? After a year filled with change at ANU during 2012, there are more questions about the future for humanities at the university.
We’ve been told of a number of students within the College of Arts and Social Sciences who have received emails they believe indicate that in some courses, tutorials will be phased out in favour of larger forums or workshops. Now, there does seem to be a concurrent scheduling issue with the timetabling software, but putting that aside, what would the end of tutorials presage for the university?
With me now is Professor Ian Young, who’s the university’s Vice-Chancellor.
Ian Young, good morning to you.
IAN YOUNG: Good morning, Genevieve.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Is this report that tutorials will be phased out in certain disciplines in favour of larger forums an accurate one?
IAN YOUNG: No, I don’t think it is. Would you like me to give you a little bit of background in terms of what we’re planning?
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Yes, please.
IAN YOUNG: Okay. Well, one of the really important things about an ANU education is that it’s research led. We have the best researchers in the country employed at ANU, and we have some of the best students here. We want to be able to get them to engage with each other in really important ways that develop learning.
Now, the traditional model that you and I would have had at university is that you go along to a big lecture and then after that you split off into smaller tutorial groups. What our students are telling us is that this is just not working anymore, and the reason for that is when I was a student, I actually got the content, the material, in the lecture, but today that doesn’t happen. Our students get the material before-hand online or in a streamed video. There’s a whole lot of ways of doing that.
We’re trying to look at how do you actually now change that lecture process. What’s being proposed within some subjects within our College of Arts and Social Sciences is to work on a process that was pioneered here at ANU by Professor John Minns, and John actually won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Teaching Excellence two years ago for exactly this sort of workshop teaching.
What you start to do is to combine the lecture and the tutorial into a single workshop. So, the lecturer comes along, they actually deliver a broad overview of the material, and then the students break up into small groups. They interact in those small groups with the lecturer present, with a number of tutors present, and then they come together again. They share the material that they’ve been talking about, they interact with the lecturer again.
So actually – rather than taking the lecture and the tutorial and splitting them in two, things which are not connected together at all – you try and bring all these together so that you get a real environment where our students actually get to interact with the research leader. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
This has been trialled in a number of places within our College of Arts and Social Sciences and now the College is starting to talk to students about rolling this out in a larger way in some of our second and third year courses. Not all the courses. Not in first year courses. It’s really about trying to find new educational ways to engage with our students.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: How does that not reduce the contact students previously enjoyed with tutors, though, Ian Young? How does that not reduce the face-to-face contact and the smaller group attention, that’s the feature of the tutorial teaching model?
IAN YOUNG: Well, they’re still in small groups and, in fact, my view is that it actually improves the interaction because, you know, you’ve got to remember that particularly at ANU, we’ve got some of the most gifted students as well and so a lot of the advantage of a tutorial or any small group interaction is your interaction with your peers.
And so you keep the interaction with the peers. You get to share material across the groups that are there, they’re not broken up into silos, and most importantly, you actually get to have real interaction with the research leader, with the things that are important about ANU.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: So who is going to have direct contact with the students? Who’s going to mark their work, most importantly?
IAN YOUNG: Well, marking and assessment is not changing in this process at all. So that’s a completely different element to this. Marking occurs either by the lecturer marking it or by tutors marking it. There will continue to be tutors in this environment.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Will we see this proposal move to other schools and other areas if you judge it’s a success?
IAN YOUNG: It hasn’t really been talked about across any of our other colleges at this stage, as far as I’m aware. So, you know, it’s a thing which is being trialled within the Arts and Social Sciences. I certainly have been encouraging my staff to be innovative about education, to look at new ways to actually engage with our students because what we find, not only here, but right across universities in Australia at the present time, is that students are switching from lectures. They’re just not coming to them.
We’ve got to find ways that we can actually make this learning process a real education. A real education.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: How will you know that you’re not compromising student learning? What benchmarks will you set yourself?
IAN YOUNG: Well, what we do is we survey students very, very regularly in terms of their perceptions of the quality of learning and getting to this stage, one of the reasons that the college is actually very keen to push down this route is that in the courses where this model has been trialled in the past, student evaluations of the quality of learning have gone up. And so we obviously continue to monitor that. It’s actually very important for us.
ANU has some of the highest student evaluations of our learning at any Australian university and what we’re aiming to do is to push that to even higher levels.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Now, we heard this last year about the School of Music; that the changes would create greater flexibility, greater responsiveness for the future. Our information is that in fact there are very many fewer students in the School of Music. What risks are you running in changing a fundamental educational standard at a university that’s always been among Australia’s very best?
IAN YOUNG: Well, look, you’ve got to be at the cutting edge in these sorts of things, Genevieve. You don’t want to fall behind in terms of pedagogy. I mean, that’s the nature of a university, to be innovative, to do things differently. This has been very carefully thought through in the sense that the people who are driving this have actually won awards for this style of education. Not just a local award, not just a university award, but the people who have pioneered this actually have won awards as Australia’s leading educators. So there’s good pedagogy behind this that says it is a very good way of interacting.
Now, look, whenever there’s change, people are worried about change and worried about what the future might hold and so it’s quite natural that our students would be concerned about this and we will try and allay those fears. It’s also natural that our staff might be concerned about it as well because in a sense, this is going to lift the bar for both our staff and students. Students are now going to have to come along to these workshops really prepared, having done their reading, ready to interact, and they’re going to be interacting with tutors and with the research leader in this year.
And similarly, our lecturing staff are going to have to be prepared to field the really challenging questions from our very, very gifted students across this as well. And, of course, that’s what a really high-class education should all be about today. It’s really about lifting the bar, it’s about getting a really fertile environment where there can be real interactions of a very high level.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Professor Young, is this all about the bottom line? Is this a budget driven decision? Are there better cost structures in place for the ANU as a result of this?
IAN YOUNG: No. Obviously we’ve been very public about looking at our finances and we’re working through that right now, and I know that the Union you’re going to talk to in a few moments will actually conflate the floor with enterprise bargaining agreements and all those sorts of things, but right now, this is all about trying to actually interact with our students in a much more effective way.
Personally, I haven’t actually done the numbers to work out whether this is less expensive or more expensive as a model of education than what we use now. In terms of the number of hours of interaction that students have with staff, it won’t change, and from a student’s point of view, you’ll actually get more time interacting with the research leader, with the lecturer, than you’ve had in the past.
GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Professor Young, many thanks for your time.
IAN YOUNG: It’s been a pleasure, Genevieve.
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