This morning I participated in a round table discussion at the Guardian newspaper headquarters on applicants' decision-maing in relation to university choices. There were about 16 of us around the table including people from the 'Which?' and 'Push' guides to universities as well as representatives from the NUS, university consultancies, sixth form colleges, Guild HE institutions, and the Higher Education Acdemy. I was actually one of only four university representatives there - the others being from the Open University and from Birkbeck (there were two of us from Sheffield). The plan is that the report of our discussions will feature in the Guardian on 11 December.
Much of our discsusion was about the provision of information to prospective students. We all recognise that there is more and more information available to them, but also that navigating such information is extremely difficult for a 17 year old. Thus the efforts of David Willetts and others to increase the information for candidates in the belief that this will lead to better decision making is questionable: it may instead lead to data overload and recourse to decision-making based on prejudices and pre-conceptions.
Most of the information that candidates have available to them is based on 'Web 1' ideas. We decide what to put out and we largely control the messages. OK - we may occasionally do market research to find out what information candidates say they want (as was done before the identification of the elements for inclusion in the KIS): but once we have the list we present the data as a one-way exercise with little possibility of dialogue or continued interchange.
Candidates today live in a 'Web 2' world in which their norm is information created by 'consumers' in a general sense (I don't llike the word in the context of HE relationships). Various such sources now exist for candidates - the text entries in the Which? university materials, postings in the 'Student Room', Facebook sites. There are obviously questions to be posed about the reliability of such materials, but they speak the 'language' of many candidates, and often (at least in some posts in the Student Room) provide the opportunity for interaction, discussion and 'chat'.
In a break in our round table discussion this morning (we started at 0830, so we deserved a break half way through) I had a chat with a fellow participant about what a 'Web 3' information set would look like in this field. The Web 3 concept already operates in areas such as Amazon ('If you've enjoyed this book you may also enjoy this one'): it involves information being 'pushed' to us on the basis of our own known activities and preferences as individuals. So a 17 year old might open their computer account one morning to find a message saying 'We know from data held on you that you have the ability to go to university, and we know your interest in Physics as a result of tracking we have done of your internet usage. We think you ought to look at the following universities' offerings in Physics, and we would particularly recommend Sheffield to you.' It might seem fanciful ... but remember that we are all tracked through our internet usage in a variety of ways, and Web 3 marketing is already present in our lives.
But the big drawback of Web 3 in supplying information to candidates is that one of the crucial tasks for them is to broaden their recognition of the possibilities that exist, and not to reduce their information searching to topics they already know. Choosing a route into Higher Education should be about exploring new things to do and new avenues to follow, and not just sticking within an existing pathway. But in seeking such breadth of consideration we are going back to the information overload that I started with at the bginning of this post.
So the outcome of this morning's round table discsusion was that we all agreed upon the importance of 'Guidance' as the crucial element in this whole area. Information provision without guidance tailored to the individual as to how to use it is of little use in enabling potential students to comprehend what might be possible and satisfying for them.
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