The other day my colleague Nigel Robertson (from the uni’s centre for e-learning, "WCeL") sent through a link to this article: Ensuring student success – students are not to blame. The writer, Arshad Ahmad, begins by saying that
[many] students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, that each one of them has a talent, each one of them has a capacity to develop – intellectually and emotionally – then it follows that each one should be given a fair chance to succeed.
And he goes on to say that
[there] is an alarming scarcity of interdisciplinary courses, little integration of existing courses, and almost no alignment to achieve the specific outcomes that these collections of courses are geared towards.
This is especially true of first-year courses with large impersonal classes taught by teaching assistants and part-time instructors.
It is exactly during this time, the first-year experience, when students are making important transitions, when students require a lot of personal attention and when they seek faculty (ie staff] time. It is a time when we should put our best teachers on the front lines and offer an experience that few, if any, students will be able to refuse.
I couldn’t agree more, & it’s the reason we (my wonderful colleague Brydget, & I) keep reviewing the labs we offer to our first-year bio students. Lab classes being so much smaller than lecture streams, they represent an excellent opportunity to give students one-to-one attention. This year we’re trialling a peer mentoring system: another chance for students to form good working relationships with others in their class & work together to enhance their learning.
And it’s also why I keep banging on to people about the benefits of moving away from the traditional lecture format. (Don’t have to worry about the teaching assistants bit there as the lecturers are the people who front up to these classes.)
Arshad’s article is a strong argument in support of the need for regular & thorough review of teaching programs – not just individual papers, but the actual degree programs themselves. Otherwise there is always the risk that the collection of papers, overall, can lack focus – and that is not going to produce the best learning outcomes for our students.
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At Enough of the Cat Talk, Darlena makes a similar point: "Would we demote an entire class of children for our inability to teach them?"
I think one of the things that would help is encouraging students to take ownership of their own career and learning. While tutorials etc can assist with this, other things which would help is:
1) Good career advice before going to university.
2) Good career advice at university throughout the first and second years of undergraduate when students may be struggling with what the thought they wanted to do as opposed to what they are finding they are good at and/or enjoy
Do universities have some sort of drop in centre where they can discuss their options etc with someone who has the skill and knowledge to advise them? If so, do students know about this.
3) 1on 1 meetings with interested and informed academics who can tease out what courses best suit the career aspirations of the students particularly as they draw to the end of undergraduate courses.
The reasons that I think the student needs to be encouraged to direct their own career is that it will avoid some university staff from trying to hold onto students who might do better at another university or tertiary institution or being shunted into courses because it is convenient for the institution to fill them