Yes but where does all the time go?

I got invited along to one of those enhancing teaching and learning conferences at Bangor the other day.

It was excellent – especially the reward session for those who’d got teaching quals or fellowships at the end of the day.

One of the sessions I sat in on was on curriculum analysis and design – the School of Ocean Sciences had been developing some whizzy tools to determine the skills being developed across modules, the assessment load and so on.

This sort of thing will be especially important if providers continue to slash optional modules (pretending they’re somehow not “in the contract”) and shift towards more of the accumulated credit being core/compulsory.

There was also a fun session on sustainability in the curriculum and the importance of thinking about “washback” – the impact an assessment has on the teaching and learning that takes place before it.

But it did get me thinking about that raft of “…in the curriculum” toolkits and agendas that seem to have proliferated in recent years.

In some ways those initiatives describe ways of doing existing teaching and assessment that are just more mindful of a given issue, a given set of students’ needs or an aspect of the subject that isn’t often taught.

In others it’s an efficiency thing. If we’re teaching history, and students don’t have the time to engage in extracurriculars any more, let’s do it in a way that promotes working in a team or whatever.

But I do wonder what a stressed module leader is supposed to make of attempting to bodge all these agendas into a ten-credit module on Discovering the Middle Ages or whatever.

Jumping through the riddle

There’s the need to embed equality, diversity and inclusion in the curriculum. There’s a need to decolonise that curriculum, democratise that curriculum, and liberate it too. It’ll need to talk to sustainable development and sustainability behaviours.

Employability needs to be in the mix. Students need to manifest as partners in it. Mental wellbeing needs to be in there. Don’t forget digital capability, and don’t forget to put some AI in there as well. And whatever you do, you’ll need to map it to the graduate attributes framework.

Ideally there will be some community engagement, some internationalisation, and some social responsibility. And some creativity.

Maybe you embed personal tutoring in the curriculum. You’ll need to think about accessibility in the assessment design, with some options ideally. And don’t forget the subject benchmarks. And what the posters say will be “critical citizenship”, a “global outlook”, or an “innovative mindset”. And what the student profiles say on graduates being “enterprising”, or “globally aware”, or “culturally competent”. And if you can be “experiential”, all the better.

What’s that you say? The university has committed to the Carbon Literate Educator pledge? A Civic University Agreement? The Digital Inclusion Charter? The Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC)? The Social Mobility Pledge? The REC? The SWAN? The UN Sustainable Development Goals?

Don’t forget the things that become vital every summer – engagement, intellectual stimulation, challenge, depth of exploration, integration of ideas, balance of study types, skill development, assessment clarity, assessment fairness, assessment timeliness, resource availability and freedom of expression. The NSS, in other words.

What’s that you say? What about PSRB accreditation? Oh my days. I’m off for a Twix.

Someone’s burst their bubble

There’s obviously a set of choices to be made beyond the design of an individual module – the extent to which “things” in modules are distributed across modules or within them all; the extent to which it’s possible to choose some “things” and not others; the extent to which the “things” are reflected in the assessment design or just the teaching and learning activities; and the extent to which the “things” might be inculcated via co-curricular activities, extra-curricular activities or just via the vibe of being at said campus, or in said town or city.

Those, it seems to me, represent a kind of relief from having to put all of the things into all of the modules. Because so and so down the corridor is looking after that, and/or students can choose it if they wish.

One of the things I find fascinating is the extent to which “credit” – and the modules that represent it – continues, in the main, to be “owned” by the course, academic department or subject area that delivers activities to acquire it.

It’s clear, I think, that at the headline level, it’s perfectly possible to have some of the “agendas” be credit-bearing but not be “taught” in the usual way – “here’s a topic and here’s a module description” (with only a final-year project or equivalent deviating).

There’s plenty of universities in the UK experimenting with skills and graduate attribute modules that are credit-bearing – although I hear their reputation is mixed.

There’s also plenty of interesting examples of the way that “final-year project or equivalent” thing can be weaved through a student experience.

At Roskilde in Denmark, half of all of the credit every semester is project work – carried out in groups and partly assessed individually.

At Twente in the Netherlands, every module has a theme with all sorts of subjects and learning activities – but in every module there’s a team project – often interdisciplinary – that distinguishes the roles of researcher, designer or organiser.

And all the surveys suggest that while many universities are wrapping up or closing off major/minor or “module gatherer” approaches to breadth, students want them.

We’ll be getting by alright

Going further, I think it’s a reasonable punt to argue that while some of the more outlandish claims about AI are overstated, that in time (once the sigmoid curve levels off), the whole process of retrieving, synthesizing, analysing, re-producing and presenting subject knowledge and understanding is going to need less human effort.

In comparison to 30, 20, 10 or even 2 years ago, it already does.

Many might lament that students “aren’t doing the reading” (insert a variety of alternatives to reading as you wish), but eventually we’ll settle on the idea that while it was indeed a specialised skill to spend hours in a library with the card indexes in the past, it is just not a skill that’s needed now.

That efficiency in academic study can then manifest in three ways:

• You can pretend it’s not happening, holding on to all the traditional academic outputs and processes (the essay, the marking of the essay), while students and academics use AI to do their bits in the grey area between cheating and “innovative use of tools”;
• You can take the saved effort/time and bodge in a range of other agendas, such that that ten-credit module on Discovering the Middle Ages also helps you do and know a dazzling array of things that don’t have a lot to do with discovering the Middle Ages;
• Or you can accept, in time, that the notional hours required for the learning and assessment are now lower than they were. You therefore reduce the credit allocation – and give it away to shorter degrees or other forms of credit acquisition.

None of those options sound fun.

• With the “let’s pretend” option, the new normal of student life becomes anything but full-time study. And the whole thing gets built on the kind of pack of lies that the “pile it high” business studies franchised providers are offering.
• The “pile it in” option just feels increasingly unsustainable, confusing and obviously nonsensical. No, I don’t want to “create a podcast” or “write a CV”. I’m trying to discover the Middle Ages.
• And that “reduce the notionals” one is a hard pill to swallow – conceptually, academically, departmentally and individually. And it makes some feel like “their” module is “worth” less.

But if it’s all moderately inevitable, and that last one the least worst option, the question then is what (or who) gets their hands on those saved notional hours.

• One option is that students get to get through the degree quicker – the thing that both governments and edtech companies always tell us that is the untapped demand for real flexibility.
• Another is to just add more content in – like watching two seasons of a box set on Netflix on x2 the speed. That is just filling the time up, and runs counter to the kind of range and breadth students say they want.
• And the third is to accept that other forms of credit acquisition – some of which we used to think of as extra-curricular – should now be inside the bachelors 180.

I suspect that key to resolving that question – and many others – is time. And effort.

We’re speaking all in code

Time – and students’ lack of it – has become much more important as the sector settles into a kind of post-crisis cost-of-living new normal. And it matters to modules, programmes and degree transcripts, because whatever other agendas that credit is supposed to represent, it is definitely supposed to represent study hours.

The UK always did trumpet its excellence and exceptionalism by suggesting that 1 x ECTS credit should represent 20 study hours – with most of the rest of the continent notionally claiming between 25 and 30 hours instead. And there always have been differences – modules in which the balance between contact hours and independent study suggest different patterns of attendance and different opportunities for “efficiency”.

But without a sense check of how students are spending those hours – the contact, how long it takes to get to the contact if in-person, and how long other tasks are actually taking students to do, we run the risk – of housing a notionally equivalent credit system in which it’s apparently possible to be full-time when obviously not, all while other programmes’ culture requires something so beyond “full-time” as to be damaging for those who need more to succeed or have less to spend.

That probably doesn’t and shouldn’t mean some sort of time and motion study. But just as academic staff workload models look increasingly unrealistic, students’ do too – either because the sector blind-eyes them doing too little as a way of “enabling” their success, or because it culturally requires them to do too much.

If – and it’s a big if – we at some stage get a student finance system (at all levels of study) that is notionally related to a set of expectations that surround support for study hours, it becomes more essential than ever we understand how students with different characteristics, on different types programmes and in different subject areas are spending that time.

Because just as the biggest barrier to increasing university funding is not being able to say where the money goes, one of the biggest barriers to improving the financial support that underpins engaging in study is not knowing where all the time goes.