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subtext issue 108 28 June 2013 ***************************************************** 'Truth: lies open to all' ***************************************************** Every fortnight during term-time. All editorial correspondence to: subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk. Please delete as soon as possible after receipt. Back issues and subscription details can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext. The editors welcome letters, comments, suggestions and opinions from readers. subtext reserves the right to edit submissions. subtext does not publish material that is submitted anonymously, but is willing to consider without obligation requests for publication with the name withheld. For tips to prevent subtext from getting swept up into your 'junk email folder', see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/dejunk/. If you're viewing this using Outlook, the formatting might look better if you click on the message at the top saying 'Extra line breaks in this message were removed', and select 'Restore line breaks'. CONTENTS: editorial, news in brief, ucu agm report, moocs, senate report, letters. ***************************************************** EDITORIAL Schoolteachers in the NUT and NUSAWT are on strike in the North West this week, over pay, pensions, and conditions of work. Anecdotally, many teachers are also angry about the imposition of yet another politically motivated magic bullet to 'reform' education. Like the NHS, schools are a political battleground, and have had to suffer successive, showy, ill-thought-out invasions and masterplans by successive governments. Higher education has certainly been messed about enough, but not nearly so much. There is an even larger issue at stake for us and for schools: is education a consumer good or not? Our answer to that should govern our thinking about markets, incentives, and ownership in education. Is the goal of education to maximise the individual student's earnings by following the demands of employers? Should we motivate teachers by connecting their pay with their students' success in meeting those demands? Should a school or university be more like a democracy or more like a business – owned and run by the people who make it up, or owned by shareholders and run by managers? ***************************************************** NEWS IN BRIEF Moodle The Moodle VLE is a year old: Have you used it? What has your experience been? How does it compare to LUVLE (which we at subtext now view with a hazy nostalgia, having conveniently forgotten its irritations)? subtext welcomes letters. ******** China campus Those who have visited the development site report that the 'derelict land' allocated to the project doesn't look very derelict; more like farmland, which is still being farmed by peasants. ******** Moodle & anonymous marking One feature of Moodle which came as a surprise to some users was that upload buttons for electronic copies of coursework were automatically created for each module. These were usefully linked to the Turnitin plagiarism detection service, which is a time-saving boon. But unfortunately, the Turnitin part of the service isn't anonymised: students' names are built into the filenames of their coursework. University policy – for good reasons to do with implicit bias and the halo effect – is that assessed work should be marked anonymously if possible. But ISS say that the linked Turnitin service can't be made anonymous. Oh well: back to manually setting up coursework uploads and manually moving files into Turnitin. ******** Changes to student loan interest rates? The Guardian reports that the government is exploring the possibility of privatising the entire stock of student loans issued since 1998. When loans are taken out by students their understanding is that interest rates are guaranteed to be low, and the terms of repayment reasonable. But, according to the Guardian, a confidential report has proposed increasing the interest rates on loans (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/jun/13/raise-interest-rate-student-loans-secret-report). Even if the proposals are rejected, the fact that such options are being discussed might be expected to put off would-be students. ******** Bowland Tower Everyone must have noticed that Bowland Tower is currently encased in scaffolding. Having been empty for years, it is being refurbished and brought back into use for student accommodation. Of its fourteen floors, the bottom three floors form part of the accommodation in Bowland South and East. Above this, each of the eleven floors of the Tower proper will have five ensuite rooms, with a living area shared among the five students; the balcony, which is to be enclosed by glazing, will be incorporated into the living area. Externally, the tower is clad in brick, which is in pretty good shape, apparently. Late-1960s insulation standards didn't call for cavity walls, so an insulating lining is being fitted to the inner surface of the external walls. Not everyone will realise that the primary purpose of the Tower was to enclose the boiler-house chimney, a feature that didn't accord with the preference of the original campus architect Gaby Epstein for low-rise construction. But the existence of the Tower will have a happy outcome for the occupants of the new accommodation in the upper floors of the Tower, in that on a good day they will enjoy superb views of the Lake District hills, of Blackpool, and of Morecambe Bay. On a very clear day, they should be able to see Snowdon or Snaefell. ******** Student Protests 1 University of Warwick students have occupied the University council chambers in protest against the 'government's radical restructuring' of the university system and against the high and increasing salary of their Vice Chancellor. ******** Ghana campus 1 Lecturers are being recruited for the new Lancaster-Ghana campus in Management, Accounting, Marketing, Law, Economics, and Information Technology. Oddly, the person specification requires 'at least 3 years teaching experience in a Western university' (http://jobwebghana.com/jobs/lecturer/). Given that Lancaster strives hard to promote equality and diversity and what not, we are sure that there can only be a perfectly good explanation for this requirement – but we can't imagine what it might be... ******** Student Protests 2 University of Wollongong students are protesting against restructuring and closing of courses and degrees imposed by their new Vice Chancellor, one Professor Paul Wellings. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiR6Uudcf64. ******** Ghana campus 2 We always suspected that the photos of studious, and yet attractive and happy-looking, students, used for marketing purposes were faked somewhere – now our suspicions are close to being confirmed. The Lancaster-Ghana facebook page has the photos, but as yet no students: https://www.facebook.com/lancasteruniversityghana ******** Old Sports Centre/New Engineering Building Anyone with a room near to the site of the old Sports Centre will have been plagued by the noise of demolition in recent weeks, so they will be glad to learn that the work is scheduled to be finished by Friday of this week, 28 June. As of Tuesday, some big bits of concrete on the site were still being broken up by hydraulic hammers: this operation is the chief source of the noise. It's a slow job, so it may introduce some delay, and it remains to be seen whether the Friday deadline will be met. The crushed rubble is being kept on site for use in the base of the new Engineering Building, whose construction is scheduled to begin shortly. ******** Rateyourlecturer.co.uk The US website ratemyprofessors.com collects students' comments and numerical ratings for their teachers' helpfulness, clarity, easiness, and 'hotness'. It's been joined by a UK equivalent. There isn't much there yet, but subtext would be interested to know what subscribers think: valuable opportunity for unconstrained feedback? Engine of implicit bias? Potentially libellous? *********************************************** UCU AGM REPORT The UCU AGM held on Friday 21st was sparsely attended. The first half of the meeting was taken up with discussion about the REF. To date few members have brought any concerns to the attention of UCU. Individuals are expected to receive letters in late September or October informing them whether they will be included, and anyone told that they will be excluded will have an opportunity to appeal. Most people have already heard informally whether they are likely to be submitted or not. The advice for anyone who is unsure is that they should seek to find out. The period for appeals once staff have been officially informed of plans will be short and so it would be better to seek to resolve any potential problems sooner rather than later. Latest news is that around 70% of eligible staff are likely to be submitted (up from earlier estimates of 60%). The union is seeking to negotiate a 'no detriment agreement' with university management that will state that a decision not to include individuals in the REF submission should not in itself disadvantage them. The long running negotiations between unions and university management on the Redundancy and Redeployment procedures continue. News from the UCU national congress is that a Campaign for Pay Catch-Up is being proposed, as for some years now pay awards have been below inflation. There is a possibility that industrial action will be proposed. *********************************************** MOOCS: A DIALOGUE [A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course. Alright, we know, but wikipedia is actually pretty good for getting a fast overview of some subjects.] A: Who could object to MOOCs opening up access to education for huge numbers of people, who'd otherwise never get a chance to hear university lectures or to interact with academics? Any real educator should be delighted. B: Open access is great, but we have ways of doing that already: archive.org, wikis, blogs, getting out into your immediate community and talking to people. The Open University have been making their materials available on television, and now the web, for years. And none of these existing forms of open access require handing our work over to for-profit companies – Udacity, Coursera - making a play to be the Amazon.com of higher education. A: There are also non-profits like EdX, and the Open University owns FutureLearn. Anyway, this is the only way many people will get access to higher education. B: As I've already pointed out, not so. And in any case, it's not some law of nature that access to higher education is increasingly restricted to the well-off, both nationally and internationally. We could make it far more widely accessible. A: Leaving your utopia aside: there will be fewer paying customers – fewer on-campus full-time students doing three-year degrees – to fund Lancaster in the coming years. We need to be flexible. B: Even accepting that commercial framing of what we do: what is there in MOOCs for Lancaster in particular? We're too small, too obscure, and too late to compete with Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the rest. A: The whole point of internet commerce is that you can make a living as small fry, because even a tiny fraction of world population with web access is a lot of people. B: In some kinds of market and for businesses willing to specialise in niches, that's maybe true. But in others, it's definitely not. There is no mid-list decent career for musicians now, for example: you're Lady Gaga, or you're someone who works at the 24-hour garage and self-releases EPs on soundcloud. It's a tournament economy, and if that's how MOOC-based higher education turns out, Lancaster loses the tournament. A: So let's specialise: close unprofitable departments, focus on what actually makes money. B: Are you sure that what you're describing is still a university? C: It isn't. But you accepted the commercial frame much too quickly: turning Lancaster, or any university, into a provider of niche-market online training courses would be a disaster. But you're also underestimating the transformative power of the web. MOOCs now are weak tea compared to an actual university education, and you're right to be suspicious about the commercial ambitions of the big MOOC providers, but we could get a bit closer to the utopia of universal education if we work on doing something better online. Think what wikipedia have already accomplished with amateur volunteers. Think what we could do. B: That depends on whether what's worth doing in university education can be done online rather than in person, and whether an online education can help people other than those privileged few who already know how to learn. C: Are you sure that what we do here is much different from what we can already do online? We talk a lot about the value of face-to-face learning, but we also do a lot of lecturing to rooms full of students writing notes. Maybe we need to work harder, or differently, to be more than a MOOC in the flesh. *********************************************** SENATE REPORT The final Senate meeting of the academic year commenced with the VC – clearly suffering the effects of a heavy cold – delivering a croaky outline of the new Planning and Resource Allocation Process. This sought to bring the academic planning and budget-setting processes into alignment so that the latter followed the former rather than the other way round (the traditional Lancaster approach to these matters). A key feature of this would be much greater involvement of HoDs at an early stage of the process which, among other things, should help prevent the sort of fiasco that followed the recent raising (then dropping) of entry-level requirements. Professor Collinson (Management Learning and Leadership) wanted to know how HoDs were to be supported in their changed role which seemed to him to imply increased responsibilities for financial accounting - considerably more than an expanded admin function. He pointed out that the reward to HoDs is derisory in comparison to the amount of effort their role requires. The VC replied that there would be training provided, that the intention was to reduce the time-consuming element but that, yes, HoDs will be asked to do things they hadn't done before. Mr Thornberry (Bowland College) wondered what all this meant for the role of the Faculties in the planning process, and what the VC meant when he wrote in his paper that 'the Faculty infrastructure itself needs to demonstrate value for money and how it adds to coherence of plans and activities'. The VC replied that activities such as admissions, marketing, public engagement were what he had in mind but, he hastened to add, this did not mean the return of BPR (the costly business planning review jettisoned by Professor Smith when he first took office). The Deans were notably silent and glum when this issue was raised. A subtext to this challenge to the faculties: there is more than one model of university governance and some universities are more centrally managed than Lancaster. The VC came from Warwick and is therefore accustomed to a more centrally managed system, unlike Lancaster's devolved structure, which gives a greater degree of executive authority to the faculties. Following an outline of the proposed OFFA (Office for Fair Access) Access Agreement from the Deputy VC (basically, we want to spend over £4.6M to support wider access to our degrees), this part of the Senate agenda concluded with a number of short announcements from the VC. Among these was an acknowledgement that Lancaster had fallen out of the top 10 in the Guardian league table due, it would appear, to a reduced 'value added' score comparing A-level grades with subsequent degree classifications. On, then, to further consideration of the University Strategy. It is still a very airy document - we will improve our global ranking by doing more global stuff, we will improve our research excellence by producing more excellent research, etc. This had been revised considerably following the various consultation rounds (for which credit is due to the VC and DVC) and this was now Senate’s final opportunity to suggest further changes before it went to Council for final approval. Comments and questions were dished out from all angles. Dr Austen-Baker (Lonsdale College syndicate), first clarifying that his remarks were not at all related to our drop in the Guardian league table, suggested that the success measures contained within the document be defined by the Independent league table, the indicators in which are 'much more reliable' than those found in the Guardian. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Atherton seemed happy to oblige. Ms Lewis questioned the apparent resolve to recruit 'world class' staff - where do our own PhD students, or, indeed, our current staff, fit into this? Mr Rowlands (Students' Union) expressed concerns over the ambitious nature of the document, and asked whether departments 'deemed to be struggling' would be 'thrown overboard' to reach our goals quicker, or if support would be in place to assist them up to standard. Many other remarks were made - is it realistic to state that 'all staff' can be enabled to fulfil their career and personal ambitions? Why no commitment to environmental sustainability? Why does the document not open with, rather than feature later, our culture and values, when they underpin everything we do? Senate then came to the previously accepted recommendation of the Senate Effectiveness Working Group to reduce the size of Senate, which had been condensed into proposed revisions to the university's ordinances. Mr Rowlands explained the difficulty that LUSU now faced in ensuring a strong student representation of both Faculties and Postgraduates. His remarks led him to a brief, aggressive exchange with the LUSU President, who insisted that since all six of the student representatives will have been involved in faculties at some stage, the representation would be adequate. Some uncertainty remained about how the faculties would run the electoral process for the junior members of academic staff, and, indeed, how we even define these staff members. The proposals suggested that it would be within the gift of the faculties to decide whether or not these junior members should be within the first five years of their career. The usual dissidents and independent thinkers (some of whom will no longer be senators as a result of the recomposition of Senate) proposed that the junior member should be anyone below the rank of Professor. Mr Rowlands urged top table to at least be prescriptive, to all faculties, over the definition of 'junior academic', to ensure a cross-faculty consistency of representation. Dr Austin-Baker made similar remarks about a consistent method of elections. The VC said that he did not think it would be very democratic for Senate to tell the faculties what to do. In general, calls for some instructions on how the elections ought to be run were met with defensiveness from the faculties and incredulous snorting from top table. Finally, MOOCS. A good or bad thing – what does Senate think? Actually, this turned out to be a very thoughtful discussion on Lancaster's possible engagement with MOOCs, and the opportunity for one Senator to use the word 'reify' - a rare occurrence. With that, the currently constituted Senate ceased to exist. Whether it will be more 'effective' as a result of this diminution remains to be seen. ***************************************************** LETTERS In response to subtext 107's questioning of advertising on the University website, Victoria Tyrrell writes: Hi - This seems to be just a settings issue on the FST pages. The SciTech webmaster has sorted it out. No news items are supplied with any of these footers. ***************************************************** The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order) of: Sam Clark, Rachel Cooper (PPR), Mark Garnett, George Green, Ian Paylor, David Smith, and Martin Widden. |