'What influenced students most was not the teaching but the assessment.'
I came across this arresting statement in an article by Graham Gibbs and Claire Simpson. Placing this in the context of an undergraduate degree we can begin to see how students may 'study' at university. I am describing nothing new. Students in HE need to be masters of time management and effort to be able to pass the assessments. They want to pass all the required assessments because this is how they obtain their degrees. The result is tactical behaviours on the part of undergraduate, e.g. analysing past examination papers for question patterns in order to make choices as to what it's not necessary to study.
If the development of deep learning is to become more than rhetoric why do we sustain processes which are, in effect, incentives to superficial learning?
It's sad to see how so many e-learning offerings are still based on the classroom 'tell, test, examine' model, particuarly since e-learning offers us the opportunity of developing a more student-centred/problem-based-learning approach? But who and what would be the possible drivers for this change in approach? The academics? The students? The educational technologists? This last group can certainly advocate and assist in the adoption of a student-centred approach and can provide what evidence there is for its efficacy over the transmission model.
So why hasn't the student centred paradigm swept all before it in higher education?
Because the change is very difficult for both academics and students.
Academics will tend to perceive the redesign of their programmes and modules as both time consuming and difficult; and how do you assess a student-centred programme when unseen examinations are not necessarily the best method? Are academics and indeed students going to rush to change a system that they perceive works for them?
How about the students? Surely to be in control of their learning is highly desirable? There are a couple of aspects to consider here. Firstly, some experiences with, say, problem-based-learning suggests that students may find the process very difficult and often perceive that they are being 'short-changed' by not having lectures. Secondly, if the emphasis on examinations as the main assessment method for a degree is reduced then the examination techniques mentioned earlier in this article will be nullified.
One final note. In the UK, many Higher Education institutions are beginning to deliver at least part of their undergraduate programmes through e-learning. However this does not necessarily mean that they have all grasped the opportunity to change the pedagogy to develop a deeper approach to learning. Engagement with e-learning may often mean no more than lecture notes are placed in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) perhaps with a supporting PowerPoint presentation. Meanwhile the statistics produced by the VLE will nevertheless show a plethora of courses and many students registered on the system; from an institutional perspective the quantity of e-learning engagement is high … but what about that quality? But the students may well be happy since the lecture notes and other resources are now online and can be accessed at any time.
The knolwedge base on the limitations of the transmisson model is well established and the Gibbs and Simpson article makes a welcome addition to this knowledge base. Yet the inertia to change in HE is huge and the irony could be that teaching and learning technologies may simply have provided an even more efficient way of doing more of the same.
