A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Enhancing Academic Practice

Stephanie Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429535161
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focused on developing professional academic skills for supporting and supervising student learning and effective teaching, the fifth edition of A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education recognises the complex demands of teaching, research, scholarship and academic management in higher education institutions.

Fully updated to reflect changes in practice and policy, this new edition has been written to enhance excellence in teaching and learning design and support all involved in facilitating a world-class inclusive education. Offering plentiful and rich practical advice, this rigorous and sound introduction to the basics of teaching and learning in higher education draws together a large number of expert authors and a range of global case studies. A definitive guide for anyone working in higher education, this edition:

• Offers new chapters covering an inclusive curriculum, the importance of student well-being and the scholarship of teaching and learning
• Considers the impact of technological changes on policy and practice
• Discusses the use of digital learning environments
• Explores how best to engage students in their disciplines and embed skills for employability

The ultimate guide to support all those involved in providing student learning of the highest quality, A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education is essential reading for all new lecturers. It will be particularly useful for anyone taking an accredited course in teaching and learning in higher education, as well as more experienced lecturers who wish to improve their teaching practice.

Part 1

The current world of teaching and learning in higher education

1	Global perspectives on teaching and learning in HE Stephanie Marshall

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents a brief overview of the changing character of teaching and learning in higher education. It builds on the conclusions of a 2017 survey of 25 transformative university global leaders regarding what they perceived to be the key challenges of the next five to ten years. To a person, the three areas these strategic leaders highlighted, all emphasising the global dimension, were, first, technological advances; second, education; and, finally, HR policies and practice (Marshall, 2017). Overlay these concerns with the increased marketisation of higher education, and the context is set for consideration of all three in the chapters that follow. It is the playing out of market forces, combined with the recognition that, to serve our students well, we must support them in realising their ability to become global citizens. Addressing this fine and sensitive balance underpins the various chapters of this handbook.

Since the 1970s, higher education (HE) around the globe has moved beyond an elite system to one that is more accessible and inclusive. HE has expanded enormously and widened its range with respect to the diversity of subjects offered at degree level, mode of study and the number of providers. Not only have the numbers of students increased, but also those engaged in outward mobility. Numbers of foreign students engaged in tertiary education worldwide rose from two million in 1999 to five million in 2016 (OECD, 2018).

This chapter explores some of the responses to the harnessing of growth in international students, and the associated implications for academic staff working in higher education universities and colleges (terms which will be used, throughout this book, interchangeably with ‘institutions’). These include where staff teach because some have a requirement to teach at multiple sites, to include overseas campuses; who they teach, recognising the rising proportions of diverse students in their classes (to include global, and also virtual); how they teach to meet the needs of diverse learners, to include a range of technological enhanced modes of teaching; and what they teach, ensuring the curriculum is accessible to all.

In reading this chapter, it will become apparent that the HE system should now be viewed not just as a means of delivering the greater good (Collini, 2012), but also as a successful global business providing high quality graduates to the labour market across the modern world. Graduate employability has taken centre stage, both for local economic and societal benefits, but also further to the range of global ranking associated with such outcomes (cf. Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings, QS). Competition to attract international students is intensifying, as is the competition for ‘high-flying’ staff, and today, we see 65 of the 310 international branch campuses catalogued by the Cross-Border Education Research Team coming from developing countries (http://cbert.org/).

This chapter overviews different approaches taken by higher education institutions to actively engage with globalisation and address the challenges, as highlighted earlier: addressing techonological advances (most particularly their intersection with education), and alternative modes of delivery of education (for example, distance learning and transnational education). Case studies are offered to illustrate strategic responses, taken from the perspective of those involved in responding to the global marketisation of higher education (while recognising that there is a wealth of excellent examples around the world). In what follows, an exploration of the drive for market positioning is considered, drawing on, first, the rise of league tables and their various metrics; second, the growth of distance learning and transnational education; finally, greater use of technological advances, to respond to learner expectations and needs.

COMPETITION FOR MARKET SHARE

There has been fierce competition between nations, such as the US, the UK, Australia and Canada to attract international students. Since the beginning of this century, international student recruitment numbers have quadrupled to reach five million between 1990 and 2014. It is expected that this number will reach eight million by 2025 (QS, www.qs.com/growth-international-students-higher-education/). The strong correlation between international student recruitment and trade flows has heightened the emphasis on such recruitment. Drivers of this student mobility include demographic, social, economic, political and technological changes. As the UK and US retain tight immigration controls, countries elsewhere have been benefiting. The main effects of this expansion have been that international students have assumed extreme importance to the financial well-being and viability of a nation’s export industry. Indeed, in the UK, export earnings generated by international students in 2014–2015 was £13.6 billion (Universities UK (UUK), 2018), alongside UKVI and their visa controls causing an ongoing challenge. In such a climate, technology – via distance, or online learning – has provided an additional means of reaching the international student population. Its expansion is considered later in this chapter.

Universities have taken a number of approaches to recruiting international first degree and postgraduate students. They have set themselves strategic ambitions of becoming global universities, extending their reach and impact, using the quality of their research and teaching to underpin that ambition. Not only does HE have a positive impact on a nation’s economic foundations and provide societal benefits, but additionally provides staff and students with a range of study and travel opportunities that help position them for success in the global market. To illustrate, Figure 1.1 below shows the mobility flow – inwards and outwards – of overseas students in the UK.

Such marketisation and competition to gain profile, reach and impact is greatly fuelled by the advent (and growth) of global rankings. The section below unpacks how this phenomenon is beginning to move into the teaching arena.

Figure 1.1 Full-time international entrants to UK higher education 2006–2007 to 2015–2016 (year on year change). Source: www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/International/Documents/Five%20little-known%20facts%20about%20international%20student%20mobility%20to%20the%20UK_web.pdf

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL LEAGUE TABLES

Today, global university rankings shape how the world understands university excellence. Global league tables, where the measures predominantly relate to research but are shifting to include teaching, as Case study 1.1 illustrates, are seen to influence the recruitment of international staff and students. Such tables have received great attention in the press, as well as from executive leadership teams, particularly in research-led universities. They have undoubtedly resulted from, and contributed to, even greater competitiveness among higher education providers. The case study below explores the growth of such league tables.

Case study 1.1: Global university rankings shape how the world understands university excellence

At their launch in September 2018, the 15th annual edition of the THE World University Rankings attracted almost 5,000 news reports across the world’s mainstream media – and many, many more social media posts. This gave the rankings launch a global audience well into the billions.

The release of the world rankings each year has the sort of media impact one would expect of a World Cup, or from the Olympics, and beyond the theatre and the brief media frenzy of the annual launch, tens of millions of unique internet browsers pore over the rankings data and related university profiles on www.timeshighereducation.com across the year.

But despite their huge reach and influence in shaping how universities are perceived globally, and in informing the educational choices of millions of students, there is one glaring limitation of the global university rankings: they are heavily focused (some exclusively focused), on research performance, not on the teaching and learning that many would argue is the raison d’etre of universities.

The first, and one of the most popular global rankings, Shanghai’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, is based entirely on metrics for research – rewarding scholars for publishing their discoveries in the prestigious science journals, Nature and Science, for example, and giving credit to universities for nurturing Nobel Prize winners. The well-known ‘Leiden Ranking’ from Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, is based exclusively on an analysis of research publications.

Even THE’s World University Rankings – the most comprehensive and balanced of the global rankings, with 13 separate performance indicators including five covering the ‘teaching environment’ – is still heavily weighted towards an analysis of research performance, through publication and citation analysis and a reputation survey.

The global rankings organisations must accept their part in contributing to a global HE system that rewards good research much more than good teaching, and risks incentivising university leaders and policy makers to prioritise research over the vital teaching mission. Academic careers and promotions tend to be driven by research: personal reputations are built on research discoveries, and, in part, fuelled by global rankings; institutional reputations – universities’ place in the global pecking order – is largely determined by research activity.

But recent developments in global rankings could shake this up and give teaching its rightful place, enjoying parity of esteem within a university’s missions, alongside research.

The global rankings’ traditional focus on research is partly by design – they serve not just as a student consumer tool, but as benchmarks for university leaders and increasingly as geo-political indicators for the knowledge economy. But this focus is also partly by default: while research quality is easy to capture across borders with established and widely understood data sources, it is extremely difficult to capture teaching excellence, even more so when you seek to compare teaching across different countries.

But in September 2016, the publisher of the world’s most influential university ranking since 2004, made a crucial breakthrough: it published for the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Case Studies
• List of Contributors and Case Study Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Patrick Deane
• A User’s Guide
• Part 1 The Current World of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
• Part 2 Education, Assessment and Student Support
• Part 3 Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines
• Glossary
• Index