The Ed Techie

Teaching as 'punishment'

In looking at issues around digital scholarship and promotion, I examined some of the work on academic tenure. There are usually three strands to tenure: research, teaching and admin/service. These are supposed to count equally, but there is a general feeling that researchers walk taller. There have been many attempts to raise the profile of teaching in the academic community, but a recent article in the Times Higher unintentionally reveals how little success they've had.

The piece is about Swansea university and its plans to move "management academics" "to teaching-only roles if they do not have four papers deemed to be of at least 3* quality." The article reveals several attitudes towards teaching in higher education. For a start it is entitled "Swansea’s tough REF plans provoke disquiet" which suggest a general agreement that teaching-only is harsh. 

If academics have not submitted four papers of the required standard they will be required to do 18 hours contact teaching a week instead of the 6 hours for 'research-active'. Teaching only is described as a threat.

Now, the problem is that if teaching isn't as widely recognised as research then being on a teaching only contract may make promotion harder. It is perceived by many as creating a two-tier system of academics in the university. I'm not going to go into that here. One could argue that if in four years you haven't produced four 3* papers, maybe you aren't research active and teaching might be a better focus. But what I want to highlight is that the language and assumptions in the piece reveal the research bias that exists in higher ed, despite the fact that the vast majority of a university's income is derived from teaching.

If you don't believe me, try reversing "teaching" and "research" in the piece. It quickly becomes amusing, so for examples here are sentences you will never see:

• "Staff complain over ‘arbitrary’ yardstick and research-only threat"
• "management academics at Swansea University typically will be moved to research-only roles if they do not score well in the NSS".
• "academics who do not have the requisite student satisfaction score will be obliged to research for up to 18 hours a week"

Teaching is frequently treated as a punishment - how does that make students paying hefty fees feel?

Treading the integrity line

I had some media training last week, as part of the OU's REF build up. I've authored one of our impact case studies (on Open Education). The idea is that should we be asked to appear on radio then we're prepared to deal with the four minute interview on our subject.

I was a bit cynical going in to it, but it was a useful and fun session, practising being interviewed and getting your point across to a general audience. It's probably good practice for all academics to do, regardless of whether they'll ever be on the radio (and with a voice like mine, I hope not for everyone's sake). 

I made the point that academics often come across awkwardly in interviews because they are caught in a somewhat schizophrenic situation. They are trying to speak simultaneously to two audiences. There is the general audience who doesn't want to know the subtle details, doesn't care about the history and framing work and hasn't got time to consider the complications - they want to know the key details and what's relevant to them. But at the same time the academic is aware that their peers may well be listening. They could come across as trying to claim more for themselves than is the case, of overstating the implication of their research and of grossly simplifying the complexity of the situation. 

The media advisers said that the best academics in the mass media tended to ignore this second audience and just focus on the mass one. This is indeed a skill, and there are academics who do it well, making their subject interesting without sacrificing too much. And then there are academics who clearly become enamoured of the mass media attention and trade in all intergrity in order to become the person who makes a media friendly statement. For instance there's Dr Cliff Arnall who every year does the rounds with the Blue Monday nonsense. 

I think it would be easy to eschew all mass media, but it can be done right - I just don't know that I could do it right. Which is why this blogging and online stuff suits me better - you get to explain it when you want to, and on your terms. Plus, here everyone's friendly, right?

The key I guess is in maintaining an integrity you feel comfortable with. And integrity always brings to mind the story I heard about Nick Cave who turned down a substantial sum from Gap for his music to be used in an advert. He reasoned:

"I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song, or that they buried their best friend to a Into My Arms, and I don't want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to Cornetto or something. I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you."

So here's some Nick Cave:

The random REF

<Image from gringer http://www.flickr.com/photos/gringer/5096129532/>

As a senior member of staff (I know, how did that happen?), part of my duties currently include reading papers for the UK research assessment exercise, the REF. I've moaned about how this reinforces traditional publication models previously. This is a more general moan.

I think the REF has muddled objectives. It aims to make academics accountable to some extent, but primarily acts as a means of allocating research funds. It may have some secondary aims, or you could classify these as indirect consequences, such as reinforcing the position of the main publishers and maintaining the status of Russell Group universities.

When you have multiple objectives the resultant process is often unsatisfactory. So if we ignore the secondary aims (although I wish the Finch report had been brave enough to make clear reference to the REF in undermining the move to open access), then how might the first two be best served?

Let's assume for now that you want to go along with accountability drive. There are of course plenty of reasons why this may not be a good idea, but that's for a different post. As someone who has to read papers and try and judge them, the real problem with the REF is that it brings in quality judgements. I thought that educational technology was a special case in that it didn't fit well into a broader education category and so the people making assessments weren't sufficiently well acquainted with the subject area to make decent judgements. But I've spoken to people in other disciplines and everyone feels the same. The specialisation of research means that no categorisation can be fine enough to really capture it. And it's a fruitless task anyway, who can judge the impact or quality of a paper? I think you can spot a poor paper easily, and maybe a really excellent one, but 90% of the rest sit in the middle so judging whether something is a 2* or 3* is essentially a coin toss.

So, my suggestion (if you want to do the accountability thing) is to simplify it and just apply a simple gateway threshold. So, for example you could take the REF guidelines - in four years someone who has a research part to their contract should be expected to publish four refereed articles, have got one piece of research funding in and supervised one student. Against this simple criteria you can then have accepted trade-offs: running large university projects, digital scholarship equivalents, personal consultancy as funding, etc. But you remove the quality judgement, it's a simple measure that this is what a research active should be expected to deliver. I don't necessarily agree with it, but we'd all know what the rules were.

The next element is to allocate research funding. You could simply do away with direct funding and have it all come through research councils, as they do in some countries. Or you could distribute it evenly, or according to number of staff who've passed the threshold above. But I've got a more interesting suggestion - there was some maths research (from those crazy Italians) recently that argued that random selection of some, but not all, politicians would benefit democracy:

"the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained."

I wonder if the same might apply to research funding? So some is allocated according to worth (but using a simple system), but a percentage is allocated randomly, on the proviso it is used for research. This might well generate innovative research we wouldn't see otherwise. And it prevents a self-reinforcing group who get caught in version of group think. And it'd be more fun.

I know what you're thinking - why isn't he in charge of the next REF? We can only shake our heads.