Thread by @PeteOlusoga

So this thread 👇🏿seemed to strike a nerve (you have to read past the first tweet btw!)

I have a lot more to say about this stuff, but I need to think carefully about how I phrase it so that I don't... you know... get fired.

I'll try for fewer typos this time too.

Settle in 🧵

https://twitter.com/PeteOlusoga/status/1597519547699200000

I have real concerns about the future of Higher Education (and education in general), as do many of my colleagues. Yet I feel like we're all just sort of stumbling along, punch drunk, because we've been beaten into submission.

A lot of people replying to the original thread were suggesting that the pandemic has fundamentally changed things.

They aren't wrong.

But the clouds have been gathering for a long time now, and we've been hearing the rumbling of thunder since long before Covid.

The issues we're facing are huge, historical, systemic, societal, and intertwined in a knot which is more complicated that the most excellent German Sci-Fi Netflix series 'Dark', which you should totally watch btw (in German with subtitles for the best experience).

Anyway, where was I? Yeah, complex stuff. The marketisation of HE is the most obvious one to start with, but I'm not sure we really appreciate the full impact.

I'll try to give a flavour.

Paying £9K to go to Uni has had an unquestionably negative impact on... everything.

Universities have always been exclusionary. That's always been the purpose. They are institutions that historically excluded on the basis of race, class, gender.

They were (and kind of still are) the bastion of upper-middle class white dudes.

BUT...

Free education allowed people like me to get a university education. Working class, brown, poor as fuck. God I was so lucky - I was part of the very last year to have my fees paid for and get a (partial) student loan.

If I'd have had to pay 9k a year...

No way I'd have been able to accrue that much debt. But students don't really see it that way. It's not like someone gives 'em a bag of money and says "use it pay fees, but you have to pay it back later!"

They never even see it. But they know they're paying for something!

But here's the thing, there's a huge misunderstanding about what they're paying for. The "student as customer" metaphor has gone badly wrong.

Many students (and parents) think they're paying for a degree, but the reality is they're paying for access to an education.

The gym membership is a familiar metaphor to many, highlighted in this thread here from @ProfSunnySingh (read it!)...

https://twitter.com/ProfSunnySingh/status/1598260151756402688?s=20&t=YcGjmpoPxBtmL2DqMU1Pug

So the student may well be a 'customer'. But if I'm a customer at Virgin Active and I spend 3 yrs sitting in the cafe eating donuts & drinking mocha-choca flat white, pumpkin-spiced lattes (look, I don't drink coffee ok!), I can't complain if I don't look like The Rock in 3 years

Anyway, 'student as fee-paying customer' aside, the marketisation of HE means that everything... and I mean EVERYTHING, becomes a cost-saving exercise.

Admin staff and student support services decimated. And academics (and grad students, and TAs and), pick up the slack.

Pastoral care shouldn't be the academics responsibility. I'm lucky that I'm a psych. How does a web designer (no offence) deal with a student in floods of tears because their life is falling apart.

Administration shouldn't the academics responsibility. Yes sure, there's some admin that's necessary, but completing this form and this spreadhsheet and this other form and this other thing... shouldn't be 80% of my job.

And yet it is.

Academics are burned out.

Course restructure - all about cost saving

Casualisation - all about cost saving

And all of this cost saving and drive to do more with less, impacts everyone in a number of different ways.

There is a real pressure to push students through their course. We aren't willing to have a conversation about whether it's best for them, because for every student an institution loses after 1st year, it's losing £18k of fees.

I know of instances (not where I currently work), where there are students in their second year who have gained (only just) 40 of the required 120 credits.

They either have compensated passes, or continuing reassessment (basically re-taking 1st year modules while in 2nd year).

Who is benefitting from that. You've got students doing 2nd year modules, who haven't passed 1st year modules, and then we're wondering why they're struggling and disengaging.

Yeah, like it's a total mystery.

We're doing these students a disservice and it's frankly disgusting.

So the other impact is that we're constantly having to give students more bang for their buck.

Deliver in person, record lectures and upload them, write lecture summaries, provide a 'viable online alternative', deliver hybrid sessions, zoom seminars, more office hours.

They're paying fees so we have to deliver a service. It's what the customer deserves, right? And if we do all of that, we might get favourable NSS scores, move up the league tables and attract MMMMOOOOAAAARRR STUDENTS!

But where does this more come from. I had a conversation with my line manager (not where I currently work) about lecture prep.I get 2 hours to prep a 2 hr MSc lecture from scratch.

To do that effectively takes at leas a day. At least.

So I asked what I should do.

I can either do 2 hrs worth and stop (and then explain to the students why we've finished after 20 minutes).

Or I can not do some other work of your choosing.

Or I can stay up late to get it done because I don't want to look like a tit in front of my MSc students.

More, more, more, with less, less, less. Constantly.

That's what happens when money is the driving force and universities are run by people who have no sodding clue what it's actually like to be in the classroom.

Any VC's want to shadow me for a week, just get in touch.

So that's one thing. I'm taking a break (to review some ethics forms). I'll return to this at some point, where I will no doubt find you literally drooling with anticipation as to what's coming next.

Okay, I'm back. Gonna try and do this next bit quickly so steady yourselves for a tsunami of typos.

More with less, right?

So what is this more actually for?

Are students engaging with the 800 different ways of passing the course, the lectures, the online versions, the padlets, the discussion boards, etc.

Well... yes and no. We track all of the downloads and views and some are, some are absolutely not.

Which brings us to the second and third BIG issues:

Engagement (lack of) and Assessment.

They're linked, and they're bigger than we might think.

I talked a lot in the original thread about engagement. In part this is linked to the fees I mentioned earlier, the perception of £££ for a degree students working, care responsibilities, etc.

But I feel like there's something more than that underpinning this lack of engagement

Now, some of my classes are excellent. Big shout out to my 1st year stats class who are just lovely.

But there are times when I can walk into a class and say "hello" and be met with absolutely nothing.

No smile, nod, eye contact, certainly no "hello" back.

That's odd.

It's odd for NOBODY to be able to respond to a simple hello, or good morning.

It's not like I'm asking them to immediately summarise Self-Determination Theory. I'm literally saying "good morning."

We have a generation who (generalisation incoming) cannot speak, cannot hold a simple conversation.

A generation who have literally nothing to say for themselves. It's fucking tragic to watch this happening.

I'll ask if there's anything they've found interesting, or anything they've enjoying and largely, this is met with a shrug, and a "meh".

It is equally tragic whether it's because there's literally nothing they find remotely interesting, or whether they just cannot articulate it

This makes me sound really old, but this is the result of a generation whose lives are lived online, in some weird fantasy world where nothing is real, and everything is perfectly curated.

And this isn't their fault.

And it isn't going away.

So I can design the perfect curriculum and the perfect teaching sessions, with hybrid learning, and bells and whistles and do a fucking juggling act at the front of the class, and it will STILL BE MET WITH A SHRUG AND A "MEH."

Our students are not suddenly going to burst into exuberant song and dance, just because I've provided a zoom seminar with an interactive whiteboard.

Because the issues run deeper than that.

This "meh" attitude to everything is soul destroying. I reiterate, it's not their fault, it's the world they have had to grow up in. But unless something is specifically designed to help them pass an assessment, there's no interest.

The Assessment is King!

Again, this is not the fault of the student or the lecturer.

Everything is about the end (paid for) product, rather than the process.

Which means there is no longer any room for creativity, or thought, or soul in the classroom.

And there are students replying saying "we'd love to have seminars where we discuss and debate ideas and are challenged and pushed."

Let me tell you, you are unicorns. I would LOVE to have a class of students like this. But it is so rare.

Maybe I'm just naive, and it's just wishful thinking, but that's what an education should be, right? Am I right about that, or not?

But it's just a factory. Again... marketisation, employability... get a degree, learn how to get a job...

I literally have to write into my module guides, the specific employability skills that the teaching addresses.

How fucking tragic and soulless is that?

No creativity, all about the assessment.

But, once again, I can't blame students for being assessment driven. The problem is bigger again than them.

They've had 15 years of being taught to the assessment before they get to me.

So we end up providing an assessment brief, a marking grid, a seminar dedicated to assessment prep, examples of previous work, more assessment tutorials.

And then we mark and provide feedback on how well they've produced what we've told them to produce.

And, dear reader, if you've gotten this far, it was at this exact moment yesterday, when I realised that this was effectively what I was doing, that I had a minor existential crisis.

This system and the factors that feed into it are broken.

And they have broken me.