Monthly Archives: June 2011

Thoughts following LLAS workshop on National Student Survey

June 29, 2011National Student Surveyjohn

The LLAS workshop on the National Student Survey (NSS) got some great feedback. We had participants from central admin departments as well as people in disciplines other than languages, linguistics and area studies. The NSS generates a substantial amount of data, yet it can difficult for academic staff (or university senior management for that matter) to know how to respond.

Some key thoughts, tips and observations from the workshop:

The NSS is only part of the wider picture about how students feel about their experience. We need to look at other data, including module surveys and internal surveys. There was a concern though that some students are becoming ‘surveyed out’.
The NSS was not designed as a Teaching Quality enhancement tool. It can be used to trigger discussions about QE, but it is not a tool in itself.
Joint honours programmes pose a big problem for the NSS, academic staff and students. The student experience of two or more departments/ subjects can be very different.
Your institution may ask additional optional questions on the NSS. Ask the department which deals with the NSS to find out if your institutions did ask additional questions and what the findings were. Students are also given the opportunity to make positive and negative open comments on their experience which are not made public.
When departments are ranked against each other in accordance with their NSS scores by subject the differences between them look quite large, but they are not statistically significant.
The subject of study is highly significant factor in contributing to the NSS scores and comparisons between departments within one institution do not make much sense.

The presentations from Angela Gallagher-Brett (LLAS) and Alex Buckley (Higher Education Academy) were much appreciated (a copy of Alex's PowerPoint will be on the event website in the next day or two. Many of the above points came from Alex.

We have just funded ten projects on the NSS about how staff and students understand the NSS questions. Four of these shared some of their findings at the workshop. I am going through them with a view to producing a report which will be published on our website.

Review of Weft QDA: free open source qualitative research software

June 27, 2011qualitative research, researchjohn

Weft QDA is an open-source free software package for qualitative research. Although I’ve doing qualitative research for a number of years this is the first time I have used software for analysing qualitative data. The expense of commercial analysis packages (£500+) has always been a deterrent for me and Weft QDA is first such package I’ve used. In this sense, I am not able to compare Weft QDA to better known commercial packages such as NVivo. In fact the Weft QDA website does outline the limitations of the package and when a commercial alternative will be necessary (e.g. when formatting is important).

I’ve been using the package to analyse the qualitative open answer data from this year’s non-specialist language learner survey. I found the programme very intuitive and easy to use. It did crash a couple of times so I quickly learnt the importance of regular saving! However, if like me you are new to using software for qualitative analysis then it is worth checking this out.

Links

Weft QDA

A critical examination of proofreading (from latest edition of Studies in Higher Education)

June 21, 2011assessment, learning, teachingjohn

I find proofreading difficult, especially proofreading my own work. I’ve long taken the view that proofreading my own work is beyond my abilities, particularly when a manuscript has gone through multiple drafts. Friends and colleagues generally concur; “You’re too close the text” they sometimes say. I’m always grateful for the professionals who perform this service on my journal articles.

Joan Turner’s critical examination of the nature of proofreading in the most recent edition of Studies in Higher Education is the first treatment of the subject I have come across (not that I have especially been looking out for an article like this, but it caught my attention when the e-mail alert from the journal came into my inbox). Student support centres which provide guidance on writing often emphasise that they are NOT a proofreading service. She writes:

Such services offer some analysis of issues of style, grammar or rhetorical organisation that students should be aware of and attempt to resolve in their own writing, but they do not provide a 'clean' copy or 'proof' that the student can immediately submit for assessment (p. 427).

The article engages the question of proofreading from different angles. For example:

Is proofreading is a skill which all students should acquire— particularly students whose first language is not English? Is it part of learning to write well?
There is an ambiguity between teaching writing skills and proofreading.
There is a moral question about whether getting someone to read an assessed paper is unfair. And is there an ethical difference between asking a friend to read your work and paying a professional (or non-professional) proof-reader?
Will a proof-reader ‘just’ improve the writing or will they also improve the content of the text? At what point does using a proof-reader become cheating? What is being accessed—the writing or the content? Is it possible to even separate writing style from content?
Does use/ overreliance on a proof-reader lead to lower standards? Does it prevent the students from learning how to write well?

Article reference

Joan Turner, “Rewriting writing in higher education: the contested spaces of proofreading,” Studies in Higher Education 36, no. 4 (2011): 427-440.

Update from LLAS Subject Centre: post August 2011 events

June 20, 2011e-learning, LLAS, subject centresjohn

I'm pleased to report that LLAS activity post-July 2011 is shaping up nicely. Our first event of the new academic year will be one for Heads of Departments which will take place in mid-September. We also have dates for our annual e-learning symposium and our annual new staff event. Dates for e-learning and research methods courses will be up on our website soon.

Thriving in the New World of Higher Education: a workshop for heads of department and leaders in languages, linguistics and area studies

Date: 14 September, 2011

Location: Room B202, Bloomsbury Suite, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Event type: Workshop

2012

e-Learning symposium 2012

Date: 26 January, 2012 - 27 January, 2012

Location: Avenue Campus, University of Southampton

Event type: Conference

Life and work in academia: event for new and aspiring lecturers in languages, linguistics and area studies

Date: 12 April, 2012

Location: Conference Aston, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET

Event type: Workshop

For further details please see the LLAS website. There are more details here about the work we will be doing from 1 August.

Area Studies: plus ça change?

June 16, 2011area studies, Canada, languages, LLAS, research, teaching, Uncategorizedarea studiesjohn

Liz Lightfoot’s recent article “The value of area studies” in British Academy Review succinctly outlines the difficulties and challenges facing departments of area studies. In the eight plus years I have held the area studies remit for the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, discussions about area studies invariably focus on the identity of the field–for example in 2004 LLAS ran a workshop entitled the Disciplinary Identity of Area Studies. In 2005, I attended a workshop entitled The Future of Interdisciplinary Area Studies run by the University of Oxford. In many respects the British Academy event The role of Area Studies in Higher Education in November 2010 was a revisiting of the Oxford conference. I even had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with many of the same people.

When I joined LLAS in 2003 my primary role was to run the Area Studies Project. A key aim of that project was build up an area studies community. There have been some successes. Driven by the project and in particular the vision of Dick Ellis, the then chair of the Area Studies Specialist Advisory Group the UK Council for Area Studies Associations (UKCASA) was formed in November 2003. It is pleasing to see that UKCASA is providing a strong voice for area studies in both teaching and research. Moreover, it has helped to bridge the gap between Anglophone and non-Anglophone area studies. The funding for the Language-based area studies centres was also an encouraging sign.

However, the questions raised when area studies is mentioned seem to be the same as they were eight years ago. And they are probably much the same as they were twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Department closures, the apparent rewarding of disciplinarily specialisation by the RAE and REF, the reliance of area studies programmes on ‘donor’ departments and questions of whether interdisciplinarity (more breath) inevitably means less depth leading to the suggestion that interdisciplinary courses might be a bit light, intellectually speaking. Naturally the latter is denied more area studies proponents who see the demands of area studies as more rather than less challenging.

Lightfoot’s article opens with the newsroom cry “Find someone who knows about Egypt!” in response the protests taking place there and elsewhere in the Middle East. Quoted in the article Tim Wright says “The problem with providing a national resource is that no one knows where the next area of concern will come from? Will it be a need for Kurdish specialists, or people with a deep knowledge of Afghanistan, Egypt or Pakistan?”

Or Canada maybe? Well probably not, but from a government perspective a key rationale for area studies is based on the national interest, the next protest or the next war. Talk is afoot of another referendum in Quebec, but whether that referendum, whatever its outcome, will generate much interest in the UK is unclear. The rationales for area studies tend focus on the need to understand the different, the unknown, the economically important and the dangerous. Perhaps the real worry is that we will never seek to understand those societies which we see as similar, known, economically unimportant and safe.

Reference: Lightfoot, L. (2011) The Value of Area Studies, British Academy Review 17, pp. 48-51

What is innovation in higher education?

June 8, 2011e-learning, learning, teachinginnovationjohn

I enjoyed Karen Smith's article in Teaching in Higher Education exploring innovation in higher education. Smith addresses innovation in a university-wide context as well as the individual context. She draws on Kanter's metaphor of innovation being like flowers. Of course some of those flowers turn out to be weeds.

Karen Smith, “Cultivating innovative learning and teaching cultures: a question of garden design,” Teaching in Higher Education 16, no. 4 (2011): 427-348