Thanks Martin.  

Paragraph 71 implies only looking at "full time study, term time only" for the "weekly expected study hours" data, so it may be that the OU and other part time provision would be exempted from the study hours data (and presumably accommodation costs?).  

But it remains the case that some of the proposals in this consultation are based on a simplistic conception of what the HE sector is like and fail to recognise the diversity it embraces, within and between institutions, from distance learning, to intensively practical courses, to work-based learning.  

For example, we at RNCM would struggle to identify the idea of "weekly expected study hours".  Our SU president recently conducted a diary exercise where he identified "A Day in the Life", monitoring a diary of activity for different students on different courses.  Even students on the same course cohorts but specialising in different instruments had a very different pattern of study and related activity (eg between an opera singer, a composer and a violin player for example).  The whole point about their experience is that no two days are the same, let alone susceptible to weekly averaging.  The only thing that all our students have in common is that starting at 7am (yes, there were dozens of ours in studying/practicing this morning when I arrived this morning) and finishing at midnight is very much the norm.  My son, who is at a different conservatoire, told me he was up and working every morning at 6.30am last week, not finishing until after midnight, attending classes, performing, practicing and composing music, and only stopping for meal breaks.  How those intensive days are distributed between formal lectures, instrument practice/composing, rehearsals, performance and private study varies enormously even on the same course, and would involve a major effort to track meaningfully.  

We ARE interested in giving potential students an idea of what life in a conservatoire is like, hence the production of a DVD last year in which students from different instruments gave their own personal experiences, but the idea that without significant resources such a complex and variable range of activities can be reduced to figures on a 'Key Information Set', totally lacking in any hint of quality or value judgement or comparability of the activities with other HE provision, is laughable quite frankly.

But the wider implication is why should institutions be forced into producing a template of what is regarded "centrally" as desirable information and throw major efforts into producing it, at a time of massive cutbacks but no overall reduction in the burden of administration?  If HEFCE were to throw at least a few central data reduction requirements into the ring alongside this then, maybe, we could have a meaningful dialogue about a minimal dataset and some optional extras, but until that happens I cannot see any productive future for this discussion.

Regards

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Academic, financial or space planning in UK universities [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of M.A.Watkinson
Sent: 30 November 2010 20:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Providing information that helps students make the right higher education choices

Spot on, Mike!  Inappropriate input measures such as 'Weekly hours of teaching contact time' tell you nothing about the quality of teaching or the value of the outputs - how will the OU (which scores highly on measures of student satisfacation) and other providers of flexible learning measure up against this criterion ??!

Martin
________________________________________
From: Mike Milne-Picken [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Providing information that helps students make the right higher education choices

After reading this document fully overnight, I am amazed that anyone has the gall to send out such a set of proposals at a time like this.

Firstly, it proposes a major increase in centrally imposed information requirements at a time of massive cutbacks in public sector funding, without any corresponding decrease in information needed elsewhere.  Across the country University administration faces major reductions and efficiency savings as institutions will need to focus on learning and teaching and 'reduction of back office operations' - where is the money to come from to create, publish and, more pertinently, audit and confirm the accuracy of this data?

Of course, if the funding changes currently under discussions mean a large number of  students are removed from the public funding net and become 'fees only', then HEFCE could do us all a favour by removing vast swathes of data that have no meaning whatsoever to potential applicants but are required, checked and audited to death by them.  I'm talking about all the data at module level that has been audited in every institutions over the last three years that is required to determine whether a student meets the (now largely esoteric) notion of 'module completion', together with all the associated data deemed required to be held centrally for that purpose - such as the chronological sequence of module assessments for every student.  I'm certain that some prospective students might well find some of the data suggested in this consultation a damn sight more useful than the value of 'FUNDCOMP' in the HESA return for thousands of modules.

So before we start discussing what new information might be required, why don't we first have a 'bonfire' of all the data that will not be required as public funding from HEFCE slips away, and more crucially do away with the need to audit it for students not attracting any public funding?

I find it hard to believe that UUK have put their name to this document without coming up with somewhat more radical ideas of reducing burden.


Secondly, there is no discussion in the document about definitional standards for proposed new areas of data.  This affects one particular piece of data suggested as important for prospective students in particular - the publication of 'Weekly hours of teaching contact time' (page 11 and 33).

What is meant by this and how will it be defined and monitored?

As a hypothetical student considering where to spend my £9,000 fee loan, it may be perfectly reasonable for me to look at the BA Witchcraft Studies at the University of Poppleton  and see it is 12 hours of timetabled teaching per week, from a notional 40 hour week, compared to 10 hours of teaching timetable per week for the BA Wizadry and Alchemy Studies at Poppleton Metropolitan University.

I might even think I am getting better value for money in the former rather than the latter and be more attracted to taking my fee loan to them.

Now, even if we leave aside the fact that one university might have 24 weeks of teaching time and another 30 weeks buried in the small print (not to mention using Mondays heavily so that more time is lost by bank holidays), but more significantly one university's definition of what constitutes 'teaching contact time' will vary from another.  From my experience of the DES 'Annual Monitoring Survey of Student Staff Ratios' in the 1980s, this is particularly a problem in practical subjects such as creative arts.  I've certainly heard it argued that if there's a member of staff available in the studio where the students are busy working day in and day out on their creative projects, then that constitutions 'teaching contact time', so it's fairly easy to ratchet things up to a notional 40 hours per week 'contact time', though of course actual 'teaching' could be as low as zero if you use a different definition based on 'classroom attendance'.  Anyone who's worked in or had links with the FE sector over the last decade will know that it's taken many years and many FEFC/LSC audits for them to get used to the idea of 'guided learning hours', with the actuals eventually being abandoned eventually in favour of those notionally set by the (external) awarding body.

So if every university or college is using their own definition of what categories the activities in a typical week might be divided into, how are prospective students meant to compare 'like with like'?  We could say 'who cares? let the students judge' but then it is deception on a gross scale to pretend that the information put forward in the consultation allows objective comparability in the same way that say NSS or HESA derived data does.


Thirdly, the consultation assumes a uniform pattern of interest in information about courses that simply does not reflect the diversity of the sector.  The single most important question applicants to RNCM ask is "who will teach me my instrument", which is why we go to considerable effort and length to print all the names and details of tutors in our print and online prospectuses.  Having studied at one time in a Russell Group university where a large chunk of the teaching was carried out by untrained PhD students barely a few years older than the undergraduates themselves, rather than those listed as professors in the department who were inevitably on research sabbaticals or conference leave, I think we need a bit of a reality check about the use and abuse of data here!

Some students don't necessarily want lots of the information proposed in the consultation - they want other things.  Our applicants don't even apply through UCAS, and yet we are told that HEFCE has no money to fund the extension of those links to Unistats already in UCAS to the other systems for entry to HE, that the consultation largely ignores.  I think we might try putting the horse before the cart and getting what public information is already available more easily into the hands of prospective students first, before looking more widely at what else might be needed.


Finally, who thought of the idea of having the consultation event for the northern hordes (ie Birmingham and northwards) on a controversial and extremely complex topic, one working day before the consultation finishes??  Words fail me!


Mike


Mike Milne-Picken
Academic Registrar
Royal Northern College of Music
124 Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9RD
T (44) 0161 907 5331
F (44) 0161 273 8188
E [log in to unmask]<BLOCKED::mailto:[log in to unmask]>
www.rncm.ac.uk





From: Mike Milne-Picken
Sent: 29 November 2010 17:59
To: 'Academic, financial or space planning in UK universities'
Subject: FW: Providing information that helps students make the right higher education choices

From: HEFCE alerts to higher education institutions [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert STEWART [7047]
Sent: 29 November 2010 16:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Providing information that helps students make the right higher education choices

Providing information that helps students make the right higher education choices
A discussion opens on the information that higher education providers publish to help prospective students choose the course and institution that are best for them.

To read this item in full visit: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2010/choices.htm

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Interesting.  We have a new three letter acronym - KIS (Key Information Set) - that's going to involve us all in collecting lots more data down to course level.

For the "Number of hours' study expected per week and mix of learning and teaching methods" measure proposed, surely someone will point out that an institution can claim "this course involves 12 hours per week of timetabled contact hours", but how will they check whether that's true and it's not really 10 hours?

I can remember 25 years ago (sorry!) in the local authority/public sector (but not universities) that we used to a survey of actual contact hours (ASH - Average Student Hours) for the DES (it measured SSR and ALH - Average Lecturer Hours - too).  It was horribly bureaucratic and took weeks of time to collect and check - I remember a certain department claiming that their students spent 40 hours per week for 30 weeks a year in 'contact'!

Who's going to want to go back to collecting more data for this during a period of cuts?

And presumably this scheme will have to be extended to Scotland and Wales institutions, if England is not to be at a disadvantage?

I also wonder how this will work if HEFCE stop funding institutions whose provision is entirely in price group C or D?    We're all currently used to "He who pays the piper calls the tune", but I have a few unanswered questions about whether this will ever see the light of day in the brave new world of private funding of HE.

Mike


Mike Milne-Picken
Academic Registrar
Royal Northern College of Music
124 Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9RD
T (44) 0161 907 5331
F (44) 0161 273 8188
E [log in to unmask]<BLOCKED::mailto:[log in to unmask]>
www.rncm.ac.uk




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