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The missing middle ground between research-led and practice-led education

by Saeed Talebi and Nick Morton

A peer reviewer recently challenged our pedagogical approach. We had described embedding an industry-led research project on Digital Twin development into our built environment curriculum as ‘research-informed teaching’. The reviewer disagreed: this was ‘practice-led rather than research-informed,’ they argued, because students weren’t producing research outputs themselves.

The comment revealed a conceptual confusion we suspect is widespread in higher education. We often assume that if students aren’t producing original research, then any industry-focused teaching must simply be vocational training with academic window-dressing. This leaves practice-facing disciplines in an awkward position: industry engagement is essential to what we do, but it risks being dismissed as less scholarly. There is, however, a middle ground.

Healey and Jenkins’ (2009) model offers a useful way through this confusion. They identify four modes of engaging undergraduates with research: research-led (learning about current scholarship), research-oriented (learning research methods), research-based (undertaking inquiry), and research-tutored (engaging in research discussions). These are mapped across two dimensions: whether students are positioned as audience or participants, and whether the emphasis falls on research content or processes. The model’s key insight is that students can be meaningfully engaged with research even when they aren’t producing research outputs themselves. The question isn’t simply whether students are ‘doing research’, it’s whether they’re positioned as passive recipients of established knowledge or as active participants in scholarly inquiry.

Practice-led teaching operates on different logic, though that logic has a closer relationship to applied research than is sometimes acknowledged. Its primary aim is developing professional competence through authentic engagement with messy problems and competing stakeholder priorities. The distinction isn’t whether industry is involved – it can be present in both approaches. The distinction lies in how students are positioned in relation to knowledge. In practice-led education, knowledge tends to be treated as relatively settled. In research-informed education, knowledge is contested, evolving, and open to question. An opportunity arises when these approaches coincide without conscious design, and a risk emerges when they collapse into one another. Research-informed teaching can become performative, referencing staff publications without changing how students learn. Practice-led teaching can slip into employability theatre, where live briefs are added without interrogating what knowledge students are actually developing.

As Professor Hanifa Shah OBE recently argued in Times Higher Education, STEAM education at its best equips students to “move fluidly between analytical and imaginative modes of thinking“, asking critical questions, considering ethical implications, and bringing meaning to innovation. This is precisely the disposition that research-informed teaching seeks to develop. In STEAM disciplines, including architecture, built environment, computing and engineering, emerging technologies create spaces where research and practice intersect meaningfully. Digital Twins and real-time monitoring tools, for example, allow students to work with live systems while engaging critically with the assumptions and ethics embedded within them. Students aren’t merely applying research after the fact, nor mimicking professional routines. They’re learning to question how data is generated, how models simplify reality, and how decisions are shaped by both evidence and judgement. Practice becomes a site of inquiry.

There’s an institutional dimension here too. Across the sector, promotion frameworks, workload models, and teaching quality metrics often reward research visibility and industry engagement without asking how either is translated pedagogically. Academics are encouraged to ‘bring research into teaching’ and ‘embed employability’, yet rarely supported in doing the difficult design work that meaningful integration requires. Recent discussions within the sector have highlighted how delivery models shape the possibilities for integrating academic and workplace learning. These are sector-wide conversations, and they reflect shared challenges around diverse learner cohorts, blended delivery, and the risk of compliance overtaking genuine learning. As a result, many innovative practices remain dependent on individual effort rather than structural support.

None of this means practice-led and research-informed approaches are mutually exclusive. The most effective curricula often blend elements of both. But blending deliberately is quite different from conflating accidentally.

When designing industry-engaged teaching, it’s worth asking honest questions. Are students positioned as inquirers or executors? Are they engaging with contested knowledge or settled practice? Does assessment reward critical reflection or merely competent performance? Is the industry project a vehicle for scholarly inquiry, or is scholarly framing a veneer over vocational training?

The answers won’t always be clear-cut, and that’s fine. But asking the questions helps us design with intention rather than stumbling into confusion – and helps us articulate what we’re doing when a peer reviewer, a sceptical colleague, or a university committee asks us to justify our approach.

Dr Saeed Talebi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Birmingham City University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He has held a number of T&L leadership roles, including Departmental Lead, Course Leader, and Academic Lead for Teaching Excellence and Student Experience. He has a keen interest in pedagogy in higher education, with particular interest in research-informed teaching and the integration of emerging technologies and practice-led projects into built environment curricula to enhance student outcomes and experience. He has also led the delivery of large STEAM research projects.

Professor Nick Morton is the Academic Director of Partnerships and STEAM at Birmingham City University. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his track record in curriculum development. He has held a number of senior leadership roles at BCU, including Associate Dean for Teaching Education and Student Experience, overseeing Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He was elected Vice-Chair of the Council of Heads of the Built Environment (CHOBE) in 2012 and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).


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Open universities: between radical promise and market reality

by Ourania Filippakou

Open universities have long symbolised a radical departure from the exclusivity of conventional universities. Conceived as institutions of access, intellectual emancipation, and social transformation, they promised to disrupt rigid academic hierarchies and democratise knowledge. Yet, as higher education is increasingly reshaped by market logics, can open universities still claim to be engines of social progress, or have they become institutions that now reproduce the very inequalities they sought to dismantle?

This question is not merely academic; it is profoundly political. Across the globe, democratic institutions are under siege, and the erosion of democracy is no longer an abstraction – it is unfolding in real time (cf EIU, 2024; Jones, 2025). The rise of far-right ideologies, resurgent racism, intensified attacks on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and the erosion of protections for migrants and marginalised communities all point to a crisis of democracy that cannot be separated from the crisis of education (Giroux, 2025). As Giroux (1984) argues, education is never neutral; it can operate as both a potential site for fostering critical consciousness and resistance and a mechanism for reproducing systems of social control and domination. Similarly, Butler (2005) reminds us that the very categories of who counts as human, who is deemed grievable, and whose knowledge is legitimised are deeply political struggles.

Open universities, once heralded as radical interventions in knowledge production, now find themselves entangled in these struggles. Increasingly, they are forced to reconcile their egalitarian aspirations with the ruthless pressures of neoliberalism and market-driven reforms. The challenge they face is no less than existential: to what extent can they uphold their role as spaces of intellectual and social transformation, or will they become further absorbed into the logics of commodification and control?

My article (Filippakou, 2025) in Policy Reviews in Higher Education, ‘Two ideologies of openness: a comparative analysis of the Open Universities in the UK and Greece’, foregrounds a crucial but often overlooked dimension: the ideological battles that have shaped open universities over time. The UK Open University (OU) and the Hellenic Open University (HOU) exemplify two distinct yet converging trajectories. The UK OU, founded in the 1960s as part of a broader post-war commitment to social mobility, was a political project – an experiment in making university education available to those long excluded from elite institutions. The HOU, by contrast, emerged in the late 1990s within the European Union’s push for a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning was increasingly framed primarily in terms of workforce development. While both institutions embraced ‘openness’ as a defining principle, the meaning of that openness has shifted – from an egalitarian vision of education as a public good to a model struggling to reconcile social inclusion with neoliberal imperatives.

A key insight of this analysis is that open universities do not merely widen participation; they reflect deeper contestations over the purpose of higher education itself. The UK OU’s early success inspired similar models worldwide, but today, relentless marketisation – rising tuition fees, budget cuts, and the growing encroachment of corporate interests – threatens to erode its founding ethos.

Meanwhile, the HOU was shaped by a European policy landscape that framed openness not merely as intellectual emancipation but as economic necessity. Both cases illustrate the paradox of open universities: they continue to expand access, yet their structural constraints increasingly align them with the logic of precarity, credentialism, and market-driven efficiency.

This struggle over education is central to the survival of democracy. Arendt (1961, 2005) warned that democracy is not self-sustaining; it depends on an informed citizenry capable of judgment, debate, and resistance. Higher education, in this sense, is not simply about skills or employability – it is about cultivating the capacity to think critically, to challenge authority, and to hold power to account (Giroux, 2019). Open universities were once at the forefront of this democratic mission. But as universities in general, and open universities in particular, become increasingly instrumentalised – shaped by political forces intent on suppressing dissent, commodifying learning, and hollowing out universities’ transformative potential – their role in sustaining democratic publics is under threat.

The real question, then, is not simply whether open universities remain ‘open’ but how they define and enact this openness. To what extent do they serve as institutions of intellectual and civic transformation, or have they primarily been reduced to flexible degree factories, catering to market demands under the guise of accessibility? By comparing the UK and Greek experiences, this article aims to challenge readers to rethink the ideological stakes of openness in higher education today. The implications extend far beyond open universities themselves. The broader appeal of this analysis lies in its relevance to anyone interested in universities as sites of social change. Open universities are not just alternatives to conventional universities – they represent larger struggles over knowledge, democracy, and economic power. The creeping normalisation of authoritarian politics, the suppression of academic freedom, and the assault on marginalised voices in public discourse demand that we reclaim higher education as a site of resistance.

Can open universities reclaim their radical promise? If higher education is to resist the encroachment of neoliberalism and reactionary politics, we must actively defend institutions that prioritise intellectual freedom, civic literacy, and higher education for the public good. The future of open universities – and higher education itself – depends not only on institutional policies but on whether scholars, educators, and students collectively resist these forces. The battle for openness is not just about access; it is about the kind of society we choose to build – for ourselves and the generations to come.

Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.


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“I blame the teachers”

by Paul Temple

If you sometimes get the sense that your teaching isn’t having much effect on the students in front of you, then perhaps you need a bit of advice from colleagues at Hong Kong’s schools and universities. There – at least, according to China Daily, Beijing’s Pravda equivalent (2 September) – the “root cause of young people’s participation in the Hong Kong protests” is to be found in the teaching taking place in high schools and universities. As a result, “rioting protestors are…ordinary young men and women, including many university students who have…lost their moral bearing”. What is this incendiary teaching about, capable of turning normally well-behaved young Hong Kongers into raging mobs? Liberal studies in high schools, covering topics such as “Hong Kong today”, “globalisation”, “energy technology”, and “public health”, are apparently behind a lot of the trouble. Well, the very titles fairly set your pulse racing, don’t they? I’m planning to get one of these Hong Kong teachers, who can apparently turn a class on public health into an incitement to confront the riot police, to share some tips on stopping a class drifting off when one of my own presentations somehow fails to energise them.

But perhaps the real villain of the piece is the teaching of what is described as critical thinking where, to China Daily’s obvious bafflement, “different [textbook] publishers have different political views”. What’s needed, clearly, is for “The government [to] either directly provide contents for the publishers, or establish an official scrutiny mechanism”. I may have missed some nuances in the various posters I saw plastered around Hong Kong during a visit in early September, but I’m pretty sure that “More intervention by Beijing in textbook publishing” wasn’t a key demand of students who have regularly formed peaceful, dignified human chains encircling their university or high school campuses as a gesture of support for democratic values.

This detail perhaps helps illuminate the widening gulf between the Party bureaucrats in Beijing and their local enforcers in the shape of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and the pro-democracy activists, with the Hong Kong Chief Executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, routinely described in the local press as “embattled”, caught in the crossfire. Local opinion varies on whether she defied Beijing in withdrawing the extradition bill at the centre of the storm, or whether Beijing decided on a tactical retreat which she executed. Both explanations may be partly true.

Either way, “too little, too late” seems to sum up the situation: withdrawal of the extradition bill has done nothing to prevent the protests, which seem to have developed a momentum of their own. Investigations into allegations of police brutality at earlier demonstrations are now a demand, with placards simply saying “831” (a reference to injuries sustained by protestors at an event on 31 August) being displayed at later protests – and so on, and on. Both sides are digging in. Beijing is said to be determined to stop Hong Kong sliding into what is called a “colour” revolution (Georgia and Ukraine being examples, involving massive largely non-violent street demonstrations), but there are also parallels with the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. There, concessions made by the communist regimes that would, only months before, have been regarded as major achievements by reformers were, by the time they were made, dismissed as mere stages on the way to wider change. In Eastern Europe, the demand was to return to pre-1945 national democratic (more or less) structures that hardly anyone could remember. The Hong Kong equivalent is to look back fondly on colonial structures and processes. It is a strange feeling for a visiting Brit to see young people, born after British rule had ended in 1997, waving the colonial-era Hong Kong blue ensign as a gesture of defiance. Nothing could be more calculated to enrage Beijing apparatchiks. It is difficult, at the moment, to see this ending well.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.


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Teach someone to fish, and … changing how students think about knowledge and learning

by Elizabeth Hauke

This post is part of a series tied to a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education published in March 2019. The founding idea behind this special issue was to spark a re-evaluation of what higher education needs to do to respond to the post-truth world, especially from the perspective of individual educators. The twelve papers, nine of which will be accompanied by posts here on the SRHE blog, take different perspectives to explore the ways in which higher education is being challenged and the responses that it might make in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and professional practice.

There is a long-standing expectation that higher education will produce critical thinkers, able to tackle the big issues of the day. Criticality is tackled differently in various disciplines, and is arguably hardest to develop within traditional science and engineering education where the nature of the learning is more atomistic and cumulative. However, criticality is no less important in science and engineering graduates who are often tasked with becoming innovative problem solvers as well as big thinkers. How can these students be challenged and supported to learn in different ways and consider themselves and their growing relationship with the world around them to a create complex, integrated and dynamic ‘knowing’.

In my paper ‘Understanding the world today: the roles of knowledge and knowing in higher education’, I argue that this ‘knowing’ is a key component of knowledge – that knowledge can be thought of as a process rather than as a defined and static object to be acquired. I explore some philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the concept of knowledge and relate these to my experience working with final year undergraduate science and engineering students taking an optional history module. The students are used to processing and memorising vast quantities of information for their disciplinary study and approach learning in quite a transactional fashion. They view knowledge as something that is held by experts, and may be bestowed upon them. It has an ethereal, almost holy quality and must not be questioned. We work hard during the module to unpack these preconceptions, and during the classes the students have to build their own knowledge of historical events by gathering evidence, information, opinion and experience and working this into a sense of knowing. As they build an understanding of a phenomenon that has occurred in the world, they must commentate on this process, recognising, reviewing and critiquing how their ‘knowledge’ is developing.

As a learning self-reflection exercise, I recently challenged the student teams to write short stories about their experience of learning on the course. I provided a story structure to help them with plot, and a list of character types to help them get started. The rules stated that the story must include all the students in their team, at least one student from another team, the teacher and someone from outside the module as characters. They could use whatever aspects of their learning experience that they felt were important to form the story.

I was fascinated to find that two of the stories featured ‘knowledge’ as a character. In one story knowledge was a princess that needed to be protected, rescued from danger and allowed to grow and develop in safety. In another, knowledge was a mysterious character that the students needed to find and befriend. This could only be achieved by tackling a number of challenges that showed the students different aspects of knowledge’s character. Once they had overcome these challenges, they were able to find and ‘live happily ever after’ with knowledge. Although these stories were simplistic and admittedly a bit tongue in cheek, they nevertheless revealed novel conceptualisations of knowledge for these students that moved beyond the explicit discussions that we had during the module.

I hope that by working with students to view knowledge as a ‘development of knowing’, a process that they can practice, master and use, they become empowered to use this criticality to inform their engagement with the wider world.

SRHE member Elizabeth Hauke is a Principal Teaching Fellow in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial College, London. She specialises in research, curriculum development and teaching about interdisciplinarity and transferable skill development in higher education, specifically for STEM students. She tweets as @ehauke and @impchangemakers, can be found on Instagram as @imperialchangemakers and has a learning and teaching blog at http://www.livelovelearn.education.

You can find Elizabeth’s full article (‘Understanding the world today: the roles of knowledge and knowing in higher education’) here:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2018.1544122