This is being posted several days late, and I apologise for that.  On Monday evening, when I should have written this, I was preparing for a two day meeting of the Russell Group Pro-Vice Chancellors for Learning and Teaching, to be held in Glasgow. What I have tried to recapture is my reactions to the change of atmosphere on Monday.
 
Evrything is back to 'normal'.  Not only are the new students here, but the continuing undergraduates are back as well.  Students are waiting to get into lecture theatres in the Alfred Denny Building, there are throngs making their way up from the Richard Roberts Building on the hour.  I had to queue in the Students' Union shop for several minutes to pay for my lunchtime sandwich.  The start-of-the-year plant sales are taking place on the concourse. (I wonder how many of the plants being sold will last more than a month or two in the hands of first year students who may never have cared for a houseplant in their lives before.)  When I drive home in the evening there are groups of students making their way through Broomhill to and from the residences.  The buzz is back.

Universities were created to teach.  Research took place through teaching - through the discussion of philosophical and moral questions.  It was not until the nineteenth century that a research function came into the core structures of some universities.  Today Sheffield, and many other universities around the world like it, has a dual mission of research and teaching.  But during the summer months when undergraduate students are not around (and postgraduate students are not in great evidence as they get on with their research and their projects), and when the lecture theatres and seminar rooms undergo maintenance and refurbishment or are occupied by conferences, the university is only half an institution. 

Now we are back to normal, with the whole of the institution's complex portfolio of activities in full swing.   

My randomly chosen blogging days for October will be 5th, 12th, 14th, 20th and 28th.    

This blog is being posted a little late.  It was not written on the date to which it refers, because I spent that evening hosting the dinner for our new international students - and didn't get home until after midnight.  I blogged about that event last year (Monday 20 September 2010), and it remains one of the absolute high spots of my year - the bringing together of people of very different backgrounds from all around the world for the purpose of education.  Instead I will write about something else from Friday.

This morning I had a phone conversation with my opposite number at another Russell Group university, located in London.  She is not able to make it to our regular all-Russell Group meeting in Glasgow in two weeks time. (Three of the four London Russell Group members have female PVCs or equivalent for Learning and Teaching, so I've not given watertight identification here.)  Our discussion was around the possibility of changing the degree classification system and moving to a grade point average.  This is omething that I have talked about before, with a group of seven universities taking the lead and then going public with the idea to the Times Higher a couple of months ago.

What has happened since is the recognition that a lot of other universities are actively considering going in the same direction, and would welcome the chance to join our group.  My view is that we should broaden our discussions, since having a larger number of universities on board will give the project greater purchase with students, employers and other stakeholders.  But the danger of enlarging the discussions is that we might get fissiparous tendencies.  We might end up discussing a number of variants of a simple scheme and ultimately slow everything down.  There is something to be said for a small group to make its stand and then see who follows.

One aspect of the discussion that I welcome is the possibility of moving back to something akin to the 16 point marking scale that we operated as a university for some time.  It is interesting to reflect that when we abolished the system and went back to the 0-100 scale, a number of other universities continued to move towards a more limited mark scheme based on 16 or 20 points.  It will be very easy for them to convert to a system based around A+, A, A-, B+, B, B- and so on.  The 16 point scale was very appropriate for large areas of the university, and I have difficulties in understanding why those parts of the university that didn't like it are mirrored by similar departments elsewhere who have no problems with it.  It may be that we will have to look into such issues in some detail in the next year or two if we are to move away from our current undifferenitatied system in which the vast bulk of stduents gets an Upper Second or a First towards something that produces a more nuanced eflection of individual overall performance.

This afternoon a group of 12 us met to start thinking about the Undergraduate Prospectus for admission in 2013.  We were drawn from the Admissions Office, from Marketing, and with me as the acacdemic and UEB representative.

Why so early?  The 2011 intake hasn't yet arrived, and we haven't yet received any UCAS forms for 2012 entry (although we soon will). I remember being at a small meeting with a high ranking official from the Department of Busines, Innovation and Skills 12 months ago who ws telling us (in relation to 2012 admission) that we would have full guidance from his department on government thinking by September 2011 (i.e. now).  We told him that that was at least 8 months too late, and he visibly paled before us.  Why so soon?

Let's work backwards.  In order to be admitted in September 2013, candidates have to submit their UCAS forms by January of that year.  Such forms will need to be completed by candidates and schools / colleges during the autumn of 2012.  University Open Days, all round the country, will take place during the period June to September 2012, with various recruitment fairs and events preceding them from Easter 2012 onwards to get information across to Y12 (or first year sixth form) young people.  Prospectuses therefore need to be ready by March 2012, and with a print run of 100,000 (which is how many we print) it is big operation to get to that stage.  Copy for the presses has to be ready by the end of January, and with around 70 different areas of the university inputting to the document, we  need to start during the autumn of 2011.  Hence our meeting this afternoon to plan the 2013 prospectus.

Doing so this year seems even more before times than usual. With the significant change in the fees regime next year, we don't yet have any idea how students will react, what sort of information they or their parents or advisers will be looking for, or the questions they will be asking us.  We have certainly done the market research, but the robustness of the findings is yet to be tested.

This very long lead time to admissions, and the BIS official's lack of recognition of it, make what is currently happening for 2012 entry even more difficult.  The first UCAS forms will be with us within a couple of weeks, yet there are still very significant national consultations going on about target numbers, the funding of places, and a whole set of parameters that need to influence our strategy in making offers. Universities have this week been given the chance to rewrite their painstakingly produced OFFA (Office of Fair Access) agreements on widening participation, lower their fee levels, and enter a competition for places.  The outcomes of the competition will not be known for months - well after the bulk of their offers need to be made.  Universities are in a seemingly impossible situation in deciding how to operate in the admissions cycle leading to 2012 entry.

We are expecting, within days, an announcement about a move to post-qualifications admission - with the whole process operated over a four month period from June to September after the early declaration of candidates' level 3 (usually A level) grades. This year it almost seems as if we are being set up to agree to anything that gets us away from the current system.  But it remains to be seen whether any proposed change will have been thoroughly thought through: spotting potential unintended consequences of new proposals in higher education is something we are all getting quite skilled at. 

I had meetings today with the Activities Officer of the Union of Students and with the Director of the Careers Service. A central aspect of both meetings concerned what I will call 'degree+' ideas.  I think these ideas need to be uppermost in our minds as we move towards the induction and welcome of new students later this month. So what is the degree+ idea?

Employers are increasingly telling universities like us that they take it for granted that whatever actual degree school a stduent has been studying in they are likely to be analytical, articulate, skilled in project work and project management, and able to work in teams.  These attributes (enshrined in the 'Sheffield Graduate' concept) can apply to students in English, Sociology, Chemistry, Computer Science or whatever.  We know that between 60 and 70% of graduate jobs do not specify any particular discipline.  And some work I asked our Careers Service to undertake a few years ago showed that even in our degree programmes that carry professional accreditations a significant proportion of graduates do not enter the expected vocation related to their degree (80% not doing so in one extreme case).  Among recent ex-students of my acquaintance I can think of an electrical engineer who is a merchant banker, a historian who is a project manager, a geographer who is now a craft brewer, and a politics graduate who works on broadband installation in housing projects.

When employers are looking to take on graduate staff from among the thousands who present themselves with good degrees (or good degree prospects) from good universities, how do they choose?  I do know employers who use a simple metric such as eliminating all those who cannot spell or punctuate their applications correctly.  Others (rightly) reject those who have scissored and pasted a previous application into a new form without changing the name of the organisation they are applying to.

But many choose on the basis of degree+ - the things that a student has done and achieved alongside their degree.  It is the work experience (even at a relatively low level); the volunteering activities; the positions of responsibility taken with a sports team; the overseas travel; the experience of business plan competitions and other enterprise activities; the representational roles within departmental, student union or university governance that really count to many potential employers.  They say that our students are sometimes a little complacent and believe that they will walk into a 'good job' as a result of having a good degree from a good university.  We need to disturb that complacency and get the degree+ message across to our new students, particularly our first year undergraduates. Our graduates need to differentiate themselves and degree+ can help.  

I have been delighted in the last few days to find that the Students' Union officers share my views on this. In less than two weeks time they and me, with the Head of Student Services, will be addressing all the 5500 new undergraduates with a similar message - that degree+ is vital for their future success. 

Sheffield University adopted modularisation and semesterisation in 1994.  We may now be on the brink of turning the clock back in some ways.  Today I met with the colleague from Learning and Teaching Services who has been given the task of administrator to what is likely to become a significant project.  We are responding to repeated calls from some parts of the university to introduce change.  But we are aware that there are some supporters of the status quo - in particular, students who have come through very strongly modularised structures in schools and colleges and who fear change.

There are really three elements to the issue - the modularisation of degree programmes; the size, shape and timing of the modules; and the types and timing of assessment associated with the overall structure.  But in order to respond to the demands for change to one, two or all three of these structural elements, we need to understand what the current structures don't allow us to do, and we will also need to come up with a new structrue that is coherent across the institution as a whole.  We do currently have certain unmodularised and unsemesterised degere programmes (Medicine and Dentistry) but they exist with virtually no teaching connections with programmes in other departments.  One of the things that modularisation has enabled us to do is to introduce many innovative cross-departmental or cross-faculty programmes, making use of the common currency of the 10 or 20 credit module taught within a 12 week block. 

My own view is that we should retain modularisation. Systems for the recording of higher education perfomance throughout the world are based around a concept of units of learning and assessment - often of varying sizes.  The calculations that result in an American Grade Point Average invoilve weightings according to the credit values of individual units: similarly the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) reflects unit 'size' in its recording of achievement.

But I would like the university to be open to many different ways of delivering units other than the standard 10 or 20 credit undergraduate unit, or the stanard 15 credit postgraduate module, taught throughout a whole semester. There are many units that need delivery across a whole academic year; there are others that would benefit from being delivered on an intensive one-week basis.  Revising our expectations on module timing might enable us to bring accredited summer schools, work placements and field classes into students' profiles, even though they are vacation 'add-ons'. 

Finally, the issue of assessment will no doubt cause much debate - characterised as 'learn and be examined in discrete units' or 'learn and be examined in the round.'  Modularisation in 1994 ushered in the former (although in reality that had already effectively been the structure for many earlier years in many parts of the university).  At the moment I would favour a combination of the two assessment philosophies - each being appropriate for certain types of learning.

But this is the start of a debate.  What we planned today was an exercise to ascertain the views of faculties. When we then try to reconicle them the fun will begin.