Manchester University - permanent move to ‘blended learning’??

[BramStoker]

The article below implies that lectures will no longer be face to face unless there is an interactive element

www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/05/manchester-university-sparks-backlash-with-plan-to-keep-lectures-online

Very worrying for current students at Manchester and those hoping to go there in September (my DD)

There is no official statement on the University website or social media

she has been offered a place on a humanities degree with low contact hours

The reason humanities degrees appear to have "low" contact hours is because of the nature of the learning students do in such degrees. My students have at least 100-200 pages of text to read each week to prepare for my 3 hour seminar. I do a short (30 minute) recorded lecture which they can watch/listen to at a time to suit them. But the main thing I expect them to do is to read the texts we're studying & discussing, plus read some secondary critical material.

It's probably at least 2 days' work. Now, I suppose we could all do that in the same room? I could do my work, they could read their texts, for 2 x8 hours (so 16 hours face to face contact time), but that's really a bit silly isn't it?

My module is half the student's workload, so factor in a similar module with a similar amount of reading, plus then the regular writing we ask them to do, and you soon see that judging a degree by its contact hours is a rather blunt instrument.

And if you're reading (and that verb is significant) an Arts subject at Oxford, for example, you may have only 2-3 hours of compulsory teaching each week, through three 8 week terms. But I don't think MN parents cavil at Oxford's "low" contact hours, do they?

PS I don't teach at Manchester but I have friends & colleagues who do. It offers a world class education in the arts & humanities.

And we've been talking about the limitations to conventional lectures since I started university teaching in the mid-1980s. It's acknowledged as a very efficient way for a lecturer to communicate a lot of information to students. But it's also acknowledged as not the most effective way for students to learn.

The latest practices - pre-COVID - were to "flip" the lecture theatre. Pre-record information, or set loads of reading for students, then use the lecture to explore this material in a more interactive way.

Personally. I prefer just to teach seminars, where we do this all the time.

Many MN posters have a very old-fashioned idea of what education at university level actually is, particularly in the arts & humanities. In my department, we don't offer lectures after 1st year. We teach entirely through interactive small groups.

Overseas students bring in lots of money , universities will prioritise them.

It’s sad that any discussion is seen as ‘bashing’ . This is a fundamental change to the way education is provided at universities in the U.K.

It is clear that F2F can include virtual seminars in the eyes of universities, in which case universities need to be very clear about what they aim to provide in the way of physical contact so that students can make appropriate decisions about accommodation. Universities may have to provide more flexible options re accommodation contracts and also in what they promote in the way of the ‘wider experience’

As I said earlier it is difficult to defend the lecture model in pedagogical terms however university is set up in this country on the basis of thousands of 18 year olds being away from home for the first time. If we are going to persist with this model universities have to accept that physical teaching is a useful tool,in year one at least, to establish both study structure and support and friendship opportunities.

Overseas students bring in lots of money , universities will prioritise them.

That is simplistic.

Overseas students, with different skills and approaches, bring a lot to the table. Working in teams with members from and in different parts of the world will be the future for many graduates. The pandemic has brought urgency to the need to try new approaches, but they were happening anyway. Our DC need to be educated for the world to come rather than the one we knew.

I disagree that the social aspect of being a student should be completly disregarded. It is a HUGE part of most people's experience as an undergraduate and a major factor in whether studying for a degree is a positive experience for the student of not

I was friendly with people in my seminars & tutorials, but I made my lasting friends at university through clubs & society activities.

I feel that Universities are doing themselves out of business with this move.

I can see the future model will be lots of content providers who can deliver the equivalent of lectures but much much cheaper (to be fair you can get an actual lecture on YouTube on most topics already) and then all we need are good examination boards / assessment centres who certify the knowledge and give out the qualifications

People aren't going to continue to pay the extortionate fees that universities are charging now. That is unless they have a USP - and that was the whole immersive face-to-face experience given what we can do via technology.

Shame

Oh I agree, I was just responding to a previous poster who was arguing that overseas students needs were less important and I was pointing out that to universities they are financially vital

Sorry my last comment was addressed to @Needmoresleep

Most humanities courses are heavily lecture based , say 21 lectures and 7 tutorials . In effect a monthly tutorial may be your only contact for that course

What's your evidence for this @GlencoraP? Certainly not the case anywhere I've taught (mostly research-led UK, US, and Australian universities). Always more seminar/tutorials than lectures.

Well apparently Gavin Williamson just announced no more restrictions on f2f teaching in universities this autumn, so let's see what happens now!

Also double vaccinated will no longer have to isolate after contact with positive case, that would also cut down absences

The ideal thing now would be a massive push to double vaccinate as many uni students as possible before end September.

@hamstersarse

I feel that Universities are doing themselves out of business with this move.

I can see the future model will be lots of content providers who can deliver the equivalent of lectures but much much cheaper (to be fair you can get an actual lecture on YouTube on most topics already) and then all we need are good examination boards / assessment centres who certify the knowledge and give out the qualifications

People aren't going to continue to pay the extortionate fees that universities are charging now. That is unless they have a USP - and that was the whole immersive face-to-face experience given what we can do via technology.

Shame

As soon as I announced I was running a blended course my applications tripled.

At a point where most universities are making staff redundant I'm recruiting .....

@ShortBacknSides

she has been offered a place on a humanities degree with low contact hours

The reason humanities degrees appear to have "low" contact hours is because of the nature of the learning students do in such degrees. My students have at least 100-200 pages of text to read each week to prepare for my 3 hour seminar. I do a short (30 minute) recorded lecture which they can watch/listen to at a time to suit them. But the main thing I expect them to do is to read the texts we're studying & discussing, plus read some secondary critical material.

It's probably at least 2 days' work. Now, I suppose we could all do that in the same room? I could do my work, they could read their texts, for 2 x8 hours (so 16 hours face to face contact time), but that's really a bit silly isn't it?

My module is half the student's workload, so factor in a similar module with a similar amount of reading, plus then the regular writing we ask them to do, and you soon see that judging a degree by its contact hours is a rather blunt instrument.

And if you're reading (and that verb is significant) an Arts subject at Oxford, for example, you may have only 2-3 hours of compulsory teaching each week, through three 8 week terms. But I don't think MN parents cavil at Oxford's "low" contact hours, do they?

PS I don't teach at Manchester but I have friends & colleagues who do. It offers a world class education in the arts & humanities.

And we've been talking about the limitations to conventional lectures since I started university teaching in the mid-1980s. It's acknowledged as a very efficient way for a lecturer to communicate a lot of information to students. But it's also acknowledged as not the most effective way for students to learn.

The latest practices - pre-COVID - were to "flip" the lecture theatre. Pre-record information, or set loads of reading for students, then use the lecture to explore this material in a more interactive way.

Personally. I prefer just to teach seminars, where we do this all the time.

Many MN posters have a very old-fashioned idea of what education at university level actually is, particularly in the arts & humanities. In my department, we don't offer lectures after 1st year. We teach entirely through interactive small groups.

Yes - one of my beefs is that lots of MNers have no idea how teaching works at a university. To be fair we also have this issue with 1st yrs and the leap from A-levels to degree (esp in the humanities) is significant. We do support students through this but they often get freaked out by the ‘lack’ of contact hours. But they are expected to be doing about 10hrs work a week per module on their own - in the form of reading texts, following the guided learning on the VLE (inc. any pre-recorded material), etc. The students who do well (1sts and high 2.1s) do do this. Students at university are expected to take responsibility for their learning - it’s not school.

My other beef is that just because students don’t like something doesn’t mean it has low pedagogical value. In fact, often the opposite. So just because many/some of them don’t like pre-recorded material doesn’t mean it’s not a good (or even better) way of delivering a certain element of teaching

I’m a lecturer and I really resent the implication that we’re somehow out to shaft students out of a decent education. I’ve had to work harder on teaching this past year than I ever have. It is incredibly time consuming to deliver blended learning and requires masses more preparation and planning than just pitching up to deliver a lecture.

@CityDweller don't worry about @user1497207191 They are anti-academic, anti-university, and seem to think (along with a number of MN university parents) that somehow universities, and all their staff, should have just broken the law over this last year, and that any response by a university to try to limit the transmission of a nasty (and potentially fatal) disease, comes from universities' basic "dishonesty" not from a duty of care to staff & students.

When I read some of the antagonistic parents' posts in this HE forum, I start to understand why some of my students are rude, disrespectful, and swear at me when under stress.

@ShortBacknSides I just looked at my old university and that’s the typical course balance. I looked at over 8 first year modules. I also know from the talks at open days attended with my dc at various universities .

Just looking again; philosophy 22 lectures 2 tutorials , 4 seminars
Introduction to economic thought , 41 lectures, 8 seminars
Cultural history of Europe 1860-1960 21 lectures, 7 seminars
Intro to drama 21 lectures , 7 seminars
Ancient civilisations 30 lectures , 4 tutorials

So that covers five different depts and five first year courses .I also looked at second year courses typically history ;16 lectures and 7 seminars for a core English module 21 lectures and 4 tutorials , macroeconomics 40 lectures and 8 tutorials .

[quote GlencoraP]@ShortBacknSides I just looked at my old university and that’s the typical course balance. I looked at over 8 first year modules. I also know from the talks at open days attended with my dc at various universities .

Just looking again; philosophy 22 lectures 2 tutorials , 4 seminars
Introduction to economic thought , 41 lectures, 8 seminars
Cultural history of Europe 1860-1960 21 lectures, 7 seminars
Intro to drama 21 lectures , 7 seminars
Ancient civilisations 30 lectures , 4 tutorials

So that covers five different depts and five first year courses .I also looked at second year courses typically history ;16 lectures and 7 seminars for a core English module 21 lectures and 4 tutorials , macroeconomics 40 lectures and 8 tutorials .[/quote]
That is pretty unusual, though. I've taught in four universities, studied in three and been an external examiner or curriculum reviewer in seven and have never seen a course with that kind of balance. It seems an extremely old fashioned mode of delivery. The norm is a larger proportion of seminars to lectures (95% to 5% in my dept, though we are probably at the extreme end of the scale).

Overseas students, with different skills and approaches, bring a lot to the table. Working in teams with members from and in different parts of the world will be the future for many graduates. The pandemic has brought urgency to the need to try new approaches, but they were happening anyway. Our DC need to be educated for the world to come rather than the one we knew.

Hear, hear! @Needmoresleep - thank you for understanding that! I currently have a class with half international/half British, and we require them to mix and work in teams. The cultural exchange is wonderful to witness, and models the working world our graduates will be entering.

Could I add - on a more venal note - international student fees subsidise domestic students' fees.

@GlencoraP - those are 1st year modules. As a PP has said we now have to do a lot of work in scaffolding learning for freshers. The current secondary school system doesn't prepare them for the independent learning they need to do, unfortunately. I would guess that in 2nd & Final years, there is a) much more optionality; and b) far fewer lecture-based modules.

My department has a 1st year split, across all 4 modules of the first year of 1 lecture (1.5 hour) per week, a 2 hour seminar per week, and 6-9 hours studio/labs/workshop teaching. Plus at least one individual tutorial per module, compulsory in each module, and two to three personal tutorials by invitation from the student's personal tutor. Our first years have 8-11 hours of small group, highly interactive teaching each week, plus a 90 minute lecture.

Well that’s from the website of a very well known mainstream university, not Oxbridge so hardly unusual or weird. I’ve just looked at two other RG universities and they also have more lectures to seminars and tutorials

I would guess that where universities are planning to hold large lectures online and particular courses do a large proportion of their teaching in large lectures, there will have been a push from the university to make changes to how things are taught.

Certainly that is the case where I work. We have been set a departmental target for the proportion of teaching we do face-to-face in seminars, tutorials, small groups vs online in large lectures and have had to significantly rewrite parts of our courses to meet this target.

@ShortBacknSides

I disagree that the social aspect of being a student should be completly disregarded. It is a HUGE part of most people's experience as an undergraduate and a major factor in whether studying for a degree is a positive experience for the student of not

I was friendly with people in my seminars & tutorials, but I made my lasting friends at university through clubs & society activities.

And of course, clubs & societies haven't operated over the past year either.

I think that online learning would be a lot more palatable for students if everything else was "normal", i.e. sports, gyms, college activities, clubs, societies, etc.

There needs to be a reason for going to Uni. Lots of students aren't interested in the partying, so they need something else and the sports/clubs etc fills the gap for many.

Unfortunately, some Unis, like my son's, imposed a blanket ban on clubs & societies using any facilities, i.e. weren't allowed access to rooms, halls, etc., so they could only operate online, which students aren't interested in when they're already doing everything else online.

It is also worth keeping in mind that there are lectures and there are lectures. There is a difference in interactivity (and likelihood of being online) between a lecture with 350 students and a lecture with 20 students, yet both are officially lectures.

I did look at second year as well, my latter para are second year modules. Whilst obviously you know much more, what so am saying is that for many students if lectures are virtual and recorded seminars are over zoom then that leaves many first years with very little in the way of structure or scaffolding . If you read my posts you will see that I completely accept that there is little or no pedagogical argument for lectures but that they do have a role in settling students into academic life .

Young people hoping to go to University this September have had a pretty awful experience studying A-levels due to covid and had to do a huge amount of independent study with minimal support

My DD certainly has shown she is very capable of lots of reading and self motivated study but that doesn't change the fact that she is feeling massively disheartened by Manchester'a statement. It's not the case that she expects to be spoonfed but the prospect of all her lectures being delivered via a laptop makes her heart sink.

Yes I know that many students prefer online lectures but what about the ones who don't?

@dreamingbohemian

Well apparently Gavin Williamson just announced no more restrictions on f2f teaching in universities this autumn, so let's see what happens now!

Also double vaccinated will no longer have to isolate after contact with positive case, that would also cut down absences

The ideal thing now would be a massive push to double vaccinate as many uni students as possible before end September.

I imagine universities will be more sensible than the Education Secretary - if we really are heading for 50-100k cases per day as the government suggests, it's going to cause massive disruption, not least to higher education, and probably the reintroduction of restrictions.

UCL has already set out its approach for blended learning for the next academic year:
www.ucl.ac.uk/students/academic-support/your-ucl-education/your-ucl-education-202122-academic-year

I think on line lectures definately have a place in university. My issue is the quality of them. It’s great for Manchester Uni to declare online lectures but what are they using . Lectures prepared for an online audience or what my DD has watched all year which is pre recorded live lectures with the low level disruptive audience noise. Also her recoreded lectures had been interactive so there was break out groups half way through which obviously watching by herself in her room she couldn’t participate in so had to just sit there. I watched one myself probably great if you were there yourself in the lecture theatre but like watching a movie someone had recorded in a cinema on their phone nowhere near the experience at home.
She has also been given just the slides from a lecture (nothing else!) so not even an attempt at a lecture for one lecture
By all means update lecture performance but make sure the quality is there otherwise all the advantages for dyslexics etc can’t be accessed
(My DD is dyslexic)
I know a lecturer upthread mentioned regulation regarding making course material online will Manchester Uni be using these if their plan is for online lecturers long term to ensure quality

@Birthdaysybother

I think on line lectures definately have a place in university. My issue is the quality of them. It’s great for Manchester Uni to declare online lectures but what are they using . Lectures prepared for an online audience or what my DD has watched all year which is pre recorded live lectures with the low level disruptive audience noise. Also her recoreded lectures had been interactive so there was break out groups half way through which obviously watching by herself in her room she couldn’t participate in so had to just sit there. I watched one myself probably great if you were there yourself in the lecture theatre but like watching a movie someone had recorded in a cinema on their phone nowhere near the experience at home. She has also been given just the slides from a lecture (nothing else!) so not even an attempt at a lecture for one lecture By all means update lecture performance but make sure the quality is there otherwise all the advantages for dyslexics etc can’t be accessed (My DD is dyslexic) I know a lecturer upthread mentioned regulation regarding making course material online will Manchester Uni be using these if their plan is for online lecturers long term to ensure quality

Same here. DS2 did a starter accounting/finance module this year. Part of that was double entry book-keeping, accounts preparation, etc. The uni basically gave them a link to an online course provided by one of the large providers (as used by trainee book-keepers/accountants as part of their professional exams when doing evening study alongside a job!). DS2 could have "bought" that course himself by going direct for under £300. It's not as if the course was brilliant either, I had a look at some of it (I'm a chartered accountant) and it was pretty bog-standard/average. "Buying in" an online course does seem to be taking "blended learning" a bit too far!