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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Vicky Gunn


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The TEF crosses the devolved border (Part 1)

By Vicky Gunn

It would not perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the last two months of higher education policy in the UK have been a little like an unimaginable soap opera in which the main protagonist was Jo Johnson and the main anti-hero, the higher education sector. Rapid change was ushered in south of the border through the English government’s commissioning of HEFCE to introduce the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).  This happened at the same time as a radical overhaul of and, in some quarters, cuts to the UK-wide Quality Assurance Agency. ‘Another periodic rupture in the continuum of university and college accountability systems?’  Scottish VPs Learning & Teaching asked from our comfortable devolved zone, in which we debate the relative merits of quality enhancement over audit. Not quite. The intensity, cunning, and speed of the TEF’s introduction and its explosive amplification of the paradoxes of devolved education caught us by surprise.

There was a quick move to understand what the bigger picture underneath the TEF was and Universities Scotland organized an initial group (chaired by me) to establish a brief that would enable the Scottish universities to come to some sort of opening position about how to move forward with the TEF, when our own teaching quality system was so different to the one being proposed in England. We started with a few acknowledgements about the emergence of the TEF and its accompanying architecture as outlined in the White Paper: Continue reading

Vicky Gunn


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Learning Analytics, surveillance, and the future of understanding our students

By Vicky Gunn

There has been a flurry of activity around Learning Analytics in Scotland’s higher education sector this past year. Responding no doubt to the seemingly unlimited promises of being able to study our students, we are excitedly wondering just how best to use what the technology has to offer. At Edinburgh University, a professorial level post has been advertised; at my own institution we are pulling together the various people who run our student experience surveys (who have hitherto been distributed across the institution) into a central unit in Planning so that we can triangulate surveys, evaluations and other contextual data-sets; elsewhere systems which enable ‘early warning signals’ with regards to student drop-out have been implemented with gusto.

I am one of the worst of the learning analytics’ offenders.  My curiosity to observe and understand the patterns in activity, behaviour, and perception of the students is just too intellectually compelling. The possibility that we could crunch all of the data about our students into one big stew-pot and then extract answers to meaning-of-student-life questions is a temptation I find too hard to resist (especially when someone puts what is called a ‘dashboard’ in front of me and says, ‘look what happens if we interrogate the data this way’). Continue reading