If you appointed yourself in GROUP B, please read these instructional materials once and try not to make additional notes. We are simply wanting to test your knowledge gained. You can download the materials to your PC or mobile device via these links.
In our final step, we need to test your amazing and newly acquired knowledge by this final quiz. Please try and participate as honestly as possible, otherwise this will affect the results of the research.
Please go to YouTube and watch this 10 minute video on asthma. It does not matter if you have ever done immunology before or not. Please do not look at the materials more than once – and try not to make notes. We are simply wanting to test your recall of the knowledge that you gain through this resource.
In our final step, we need to test your amazing and newly acquired knowledge by this final quiz. Please try and participate as honestly as possible, otherwise this will affect the results of the research.
I’m really lucky this year to be working with Andy Nguyen who is a final year biomedical scientist and also international student from Vietnam. Andy was interested in looking at student use of multimedia resources in science education, as he’d observed how many of his fellow student use YouTube to assist with their learning. Well – here is Andy’s project and he is looking for volunteers!
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Please follow these steps carefully. You will be invited to complete a short ‘pre-test’, study for 10 minutes using a resource provided, and then complete a ‘post-test’. Please complete the tests as fairly as you can, without referring to notes (i.e. an ‘unseen’ test). Do spend as much time as you wish looking at the learning materials, but for consistency, do not take notes so that we are just testing your recall.
Please complete the post-test, without referring back to the materials!
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1) Please complete this pre-test quiz
(you may need to copy and paste it into a new browser window if it doesn’t open from here 🙂 )
What we need to do now is randomise you to one of two groups, and we are relying on your honesty! We need you to look at some learning material on asthma, both of which will take you ten minutes to either watch or read through.
3) Please complete this post-test quiz (you will also find the link on the Group A or B pages).
(You may need to copy and paste it into a new browser window if it doesn’t open from here 🙂 )
Have you ever had that stomach-sinking feeling and you think “oh shit”? I had it the other night when I realise Spike had found one of David’s slippers, and I failed utterly to convince David that sling-backs might be quite the thing for summer.
Well here is the feeling again; I have a paper accepted by a journal and read the first few sentences so horrified I can’t even reach the end of the abstract. A very familiar conversation with self starts all over. “Here we go again! Why did I end up being an academic. Why did my parents encourage me into science where I have to write things, and not music which I’m far better at and can just create things? There aren’t enough spoon impresarios in the world”.
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.” James Joyce (quoted in a letter to Fanny Guillermet, 5 September 1918)
Of course the difference with all the people in this article is that they were rather spectacular at writing, despite how they felt. They probably hated the concept of the process of writing on a large scale and then having their work under the public gaze, whereas I think I’m just really crap at it. No, I don’t think, I know it.
PAIN!
The point of putting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, just fills me with pain. Words swim around on the page and I resort to reading things aloud, which given my estuarine-Essex-English is not a great solution. I went through schooling struggling with Latin, French and German grammar, and was never taught English which I always think quite staggering. The two people I admire (and envy) most in my life, one is a friend from Germany, and the other my sister-in-law who is Goan and educated in Kenya. They have the most perfect and beautiful spoken English. So perhaps our British schooling has failed more of us than I realise, apart from the notable exceptions I hang out with every day on Twitter who seem to reel off Booker Prize-quality articles in the time it takes to hide the remnants of a savaged slipper. (You all know all you hare and you are totally amazing).
BUT WE ALL HATE OUR OWN ART RIGHT?
Mariana and some of the DS106 people were having the conversation on Twitter last year about us sometimes hating our own work, and I think agreed that was a natural part of the artistic process that we challenge and critique ourselves to become better. I think for some this can be combined with some human emotions of insecurity and low confidence I would assume?
WHAT NEXT?
I’m not sure really. I’m facing a day of work writing audit documents for professional bodies. It is a Saturday and I already want to cry, and the thought of completing 12 of these hilariously named “light touch” forms, I know will end badly, although by the end will have cleaned the house, done the washing and walked the dog. Twice.
How on earth did I end up in a job were papers are the currency for success. “Are you REFable”? “What high impact journals have you published in”? CVs. Fellowships. Professional Accreditations. PUBLICATIONS. AAAARRRGGGGHHHH. I just feel so thick.
The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Conference 2014
Here’s Fluffy. DS106 Daily Create, Viv Rolfe
I was very excited to be presenting at the SRHE conference last week, if a little intrepid. As a scientist who dips her toe into the world of social science methodologies, I was wondering if my work would stand the test? Judging by the questions and the Tweets I think they enjoyed it and there were no disapproving comments on my methodologies. Phew!
But me aside, the SRHE was an inspirational experience and packed with a fantastic bunch of people. There was a real international flavour and many people were attending for the first time. Are more people now interested in the big questions surrounding Higher Education? I do hope so, because there are some bloody big questions to ask these days, and judging by the action-packed programme, these were the people certainly doing it.
Much of my research may employ questionnaires or interviews, or a combination. I noted how may of these researchers gather data from a broad range of sources, – questionnaires, interviews, case studies, student data, policies. The skill comes in identifying the themes and coding the results for analysis, and to triangulate the results. The volume of work is not to be underestimated.
Software such as NVIVO and WEFT QDA are used for analysis and data management. I need to do something other than use Excel!
Multidisciplinary approaches are really the thing. Subject specialists are teaming up with social scientists to share the joy. It made me think about the demise of the HEA and subject centres that support discipline-facing research. Teaming up is one approach, but I think there is a massive gap being created in the methodology skills and support that people in HE will require, and particularly those new and starting out.
It is quite acceptable to talk through ‘work in progress’, and with the richness of data gathered in some of the studies I am not surprised. I am struggling myself to summarise 7 interviews in 20 minutes of presentation. But everyone is cool here.
Someone made the amazing point – well I thought it was amazing – that often we don’t have the language and structures to ask the right questions. In an emerging field where the experiences are not fully articulated – like in my research, student and teacher perceptions of the ethical dilemmas associated with open online learning, this can cause inertia and a lack of knowledge and progress. Therefore research is needed from a very fundamental level not just to define the problem, but to determine the language with which to even explore it.
Here is what concerns me!
The demise of the Higher Education Academy subject centres and loss of research method-support for the different disciplines. Yes, teaming up is fine, but how do we maintain the subject contexts, how do we translate the approaches and theories to the discipline expert, and how to support new people starting out?
Linked to this demise, how do we ensure that there is a foundation of scholarly research expertise across departments and institutions that can support fellowship and other professional awards where practice evaluation is a key element? Again, linked to the loss of the subject centre networks, people’s professional development is at risk from the gap in methods expertise arising.
Where are the small pots of funding for this research? Yes, the SRHE does offer fellowships, but the changing strategies from the likes of the HEA and Jisc mean that the vital exploratory pieces of research simply can no longer be funded. Couple that with getting yourself full economically-costed onto a bid, and in my situation, applying for £10K can result in around two thirds in FEC and university overheads. Innovation will die!!!
Here is hope!
Everyone at the conference was acknowledging the very turbulent times that we are presently working under, with serious difficulties being faced by both university staff and students alike. What was hugely encouraging was the focused and high quality research being conducted and asking some very fundamental questions, for example:
University students’ attitudes to debt: a cross-national study (paper 0084)
Neil Harrison and Steve Agnew
They explored student attitude to debt in England, New Zealand and the US. Whilst debt did make students anxious naturally, this didn’t demotivate them from achieving debt, especially when the perceived value of gaining an education was strong. Debt was also linked to life style choice which was perhaps a little more worrying. The analysis of the data was in the early stages, and the outcomes of this work will certainly be worth waiting for.
The social implications of high participation higher education systems (paper 0119)
Simon Marginson
There was much focus at the conference on the social implications and impact of higher education. This excellent paper reviewed the last three decades of expansion and how this had affected a range of dimensions of HE and society, with in and around half school leavers engaging in HE. Along with others, Simon observed the stratification of the system with the ‘elite’ institutions pulling away from the field, although in Nordic systems, there were lesser differences between institutions.
“The overarching question is: ‘What are the implications of a society with universal participation in higher education?” Again, an early analysis with papers ready soon!
I think they gave me the most hope of all in that they were senior colleagues and big thinkers in the world of HE, and the first time in a long time I’ve heard such clarity of thought and common sense around some of the major issues concerning us.
SUE CLEGG – guinea pigs in a maelstrom. Weeeeeeep.
Sue talked about our moral obligation to inspire future generations – supporting a positive experience and not allowing new students to be “guinea pigs in a maelstrom”.
She reflected on the shift from an elite HE offering to mass participation, and how in the UK the system is now differentiating once more with an ‘elite’ league harnessing the funding and many of the opportunities, with clearly the big shift in students paying for access. She questioned the notion of the ‘graduate’ and the benefits that were really on offer, with many no achieving graduate level jobs, and whether this was the result of the “massification and lowering of quality”?
Many of her comments paralleled my socio-ethical observations of MOOCS:
Socially advantaged groups part of a system that maintains their advantage
Gender inequalities exist
Curriculum imbalances with ‘Western’ ideas excluding the cultural knowledge of indigenous people in some areas
As with MOOCs, mass does not equate with fair.
BOB BURGESS and JURGEN ENDERS
Bob gave a most thought provoking talk, and as with Jurgen, brought more perspectives from senior executive and thought-leaders. Bob talked about the change in HE finances, not just in terms of student fees, but government withdrawal of capital grants and the need for universities to fundraise, something that I’ve not really come across before. Interesting – we view students as the consumers and the key stakeholders, but what about those donating? Do they have a vested interest? How do we work to maintain their involvement?
In good news, Bob recounted the increased recognition by institutional decision makers of teaching quality, and the support given to fellowships and promotional schemes to raise the profile of ‘learning and teaching’ in HE. He admitted we aren’t there yet, with a fair amount of variability in promotional routes and levels of support available in universities.
Jurgen talked about HE overload and hyper-complexity! Institutions are held together by fear, and many staff are fearful, and we don’t have to delve to far into the news to find many case examples of that. Institutions and departments them are competing for resources, and then there are national and international reputations to maintain. There is rising inequality in the system.
Jurgen pointed out that we all talk about diversity and yet we standardise everything? I thought about this long and hard last week when a dyslexic student came to me in fear of the 80 question multiple choice test that he was due to face after Christmas. This is not just a response to ‘massification’ but the present day clamour to measure, monitor and manipulate absolutely everything that can possibly be classified: student experience, teaching excellence, research capability…..the list is endless, as is the vast amount of time and resource spent analysing, maintaining and responding to this data.
As Jurgen asked:
Aren’t there bigger problems to solve?
That league tables were:
Like an academic arms race.
Bob very much echoed this sentiment:
Add the shoe sizes of VC’s into league tables! Would be just as accurate.
Let’s go kick ass!
Jurgen ended by asking how we can take action? We are all very good at researching and talking about these things, but what to do? How to start some creative disorder? How to work against the current zeitgeist? So indeed, creative disorder, but how? I suppose we can continue the research, we can blog for more immediate opinion and reactions, but we are talking about change on an organisational and national scale here.
There will be similar debates this week with the results of the REF and the increasingly publicised ‘corruption’ within the system, how chasing targets and rankings causes “pressure cooker cultures”, bullying and even worse. Yet we go on cheerfully smiling through the next visitors day!
CRAZY.
So, research? YES.
Blog and discuss publically? YES.
Influence colleagues and institutional leaders? YES.
