Thursday 13th June 2013 - Enabling student discussions

I suspect I am not alone, as a lecturer, in reflecting that some of the  most satisfying experiences in a class are when I am there saying nothing and not even interacting with the students.  They have been divided into groups, set a task, and they are on their own.   Almost instantly there is a hubbub of voices.  After a pause of a couple of minutes the lecturer starts to walk round, eavesdropping on each of the groups.  .That's where the joy comes - in hearing that there is a profound level of debate going on around the topic set, with theoretical positions being examined, empirical material brought in from prior reading, and a pragmatic approach being adopted to finding a consensus on a viewpoint that can be presented to the whole group later on.

Make no mistake - I do enjoy lecturing.  I get great pleasure in seeing that I have captured an audience and in watching their expressions as they follow an argument, or perhaps come to consider a long-held opinion in a new way.  And occasionally there are those pin-drop moments when you know they are all waiting to see where you will take them next.  But there is equal joy in having set up a task for a group and watching and listening as they set to it with enthusiasm.  Of course, for this to happen there have to be interested and engaged individuals involved. But there also have to be a series of questions posed that seem to the participants to be of great relevannce, importance and interest.  Both of those conditions need to be fulfilled.  I have sat through too many sessions at training events or national consultations and conferences where the enthusiasm of the participants has been dashed when they are given questions to debate which show that the organisers are simply out of touch with most of those present.  What follows the command to 'Get on with discussion in your groups' is then silence broken eventually by someone saying 'What are we going to make of this, then?'

Today we had a significant meeting of departmental directors of learning and teaching, along with team leaders in various professional services, to consider some of the big picture issues facing the university over the next few years as well as some of the more immediate matters that we need to deal with over the next year.  We had two sets of group discussions, and the enthusiasm generated within these was immense.  The questions had been alighted upon after consultation with a number of key individuals, but were unknown in advance to the majority of those present.  Some issues posed were controversial, and the tasks set were unusual.  But the outcomes were useful and thought-provoking beyond the dreams of the organisers. The material generated was infintely greater than could have been arrived at by virtually any other format.

Over the next few months we will be working on many of the ideas generated, but I will mention one here.  There was agreement for all faculties that currently our graduates lack sufficient understanding of the wider context within which their knowledge is set. It is perhaps a familiar issue in English education, with its over-emphasis on specialisation.  So there's a challenge for us in the coming months: strengthening the inter-disciplinarity of our students so that they can see how their bit of detailed knowledge fits into a wider picture.

Monday 10th June 2013 - A vision of future exams

In the departmental office the exams secretary is almost hidden behind piles of marked exam papers.  Over the last three weeks the sight of people carrying bundles of scripts has been commonplace on campus - I've even seen a particularly big load being carried in a shopping trolley. 

I carry a lot of materials around with me, including the 'papers' for meetings, presentations to be given at conferences and other events, the university's business recovery plan for teaching (which I have with me at all times), and various reports.  But none of these is in paper form. They are all files on my iPad or stored on the memory stick I carry in my jacket pocket (suitably backed up to my desktop, of course!).  Meetings papers are kept in an app caleld 'Notability' which even allows me to annotate them on screen and to save the annotations.  All the materials I write are written direct to the screen, not on paper.

Students generally work like that too.  They word process all their essays and assignments.  Some take notes in class on a mobile device or a notebook computer.  Some record the few lectures I give in my option class as audio files.  And yet at the end of the year we expect them to pick up a pen and produce their thoughts via handwriting in an exam lasting 2 or even 3 hours.

When I was an undergraduate it was, of course, very different.  Throughout my second and third years I was expected to produce three full essays every two weeks, handwritten on quarto paper.  I guess they were each about 3500 words long.  They were either read out and commented on in the tutorial, or read by the tutor and handed back at the next class.  No marks from these were ever carried forward into my degree classification which depended entirely on 10 x 3 hour exams plus a dissertation.  We thought little of the mechannics of those exams (although the content bothered us).  We were used to writing with pen and ink on paper.

Isn't it time that we moved on?  Why should students who never do an extended piece of handwriting during the year be expected to do so under exam conditions?  They will probably never do so again in their future careers. Can't we bring exams up to date?  (I will leave on one side the defence of written essay-style exams: I do believe they are a good test of the ability to structure an argument under pressure.)

How about the following as a vision?
When students enter the exam room they sit at a tablet computer.  It has wifi disabled so students are not able to Google material.  They type their answers and at the end of the exam they save their work and leave the room.  Their answers are then retained in a central file on a shared drive to which all the relevant markers have access.  Markers call up essays on screen, read them, and append a file containing feedback and comments.  Second markers or moderators can similarly work from the file version.  Marks can be recorded electronically, particularly if some widget is created to link the essay file to a spreadsheet.  External examiners can have their sample sent to them electronically.  And once the exam board is over students can have their essay, with appended comments, sent back to them electronically. (Befroe anyone points out that some students can tyope faster than others I would point out that some students write faster than others too.)

Apart from bringing exams into the 21st century and aligning them with the ways in which students record information in everyday life, think of the green impact of such a proposal - the tons of paper saved, and the storage cupboards for old exam papers that could be turned to more efficient uses.  How about it?