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Up close and personal
25 June 2009
With its part-time external tutors, Britain's largest university gives students the attention they need, says Derek Rowntree
What is happening to tutor-student contact in British universities? Is it dropping to dangerously low levels? Are we losing the personal tutor-student relationship that many say once distinguished our universities from those of so many other countries?
This was the issue that Times Higher Education recently posed to me and other members of its readers' panel.
That got me thinking about Britain's largest university, which enrolled its first 25,000 undergraduates in 1971. It was initially derided as "blithering nonsense" by Ian Macleod MP, who, as incoming Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, immediately cut its budget. But by 1992, the Conservative Minister for Higher Education was calling it "a jewel in the crown of UK higher education".
I write, of course, of The Open University. Uniquely, its 1,100 academics have little or no contact with its 150,000 undergraduates. Yet students feel intensely in touch with the ideas and writings of those academics; and the National Student Surveys suggest that they are more satisfied with their education than students in any other publicly funded university in Britain.
So how has this university managed to satisfy its students so well despite what looks like an abysmal staff-to-student ratio of about one academic to 150 students? Well, appearances can be deceptive. The OU recognised from the start that excellent course materials may be important to making distance learning work but are not sufficient. Such information delivery needs to be followed by personalised teaching.
Someone needs to interact personally and frequently with each student, confirming or correcting their developing understanding, leading them on to new insights and assuring them that they have a supporter who cares about their learning.
However, there seemed no need for those supporters to be the academics who plan and develop the courses. Instead, as many Times Higher Education readers will know from personal experience, the university conjured up a nationwide network of part-time tutors who quickly cut that ratio from 1:150 to about 1:20.
Over the years, the OU has employed tens of thousands of part-time tutors (about 8,000 at the time of writing), a large proportion of whom have day jobs in other universities and higher education colleges. Each tutor is responsible for a "class" of about 20 students.
University teachers hitherto resigned to delivering information to huge classes on campus have often declared the part-time experience of working intensively with a small OU group to be very refreshing.
Apart from telephone, email and web contact, and perhaps occasional face-to-face sessions if they can manage to attend, students interact with their tutor via the assignment system. Every few weeks each student sends in an assignment related to whatever course materials he or she has been working on since the previous assignment. Their tutor not only grades this work but also writes extensive comments intended to help the student overcome weaknesses or build on their strengths.
All new tutors are, of course, trained in how to give effective feedback (and, furthermore, their subsequent commenting is monitored periodically by a more experienced colleague in the interests of maintaining teaching quality). This formative feedback often leads to further discussion with the tutor and helps fuel a continuing dialogue.
By such means, even when enrolled on a course with 2,000 others, each OU student is provided with far more written feedback from his or her tutor than are most students on similar courses in other universities - perhaps even 50 times as much.
Of all the OU's many innovations in teaching, I believe this use of part-time external tutors to be the one most crucial to its success. With online learning becoming widespread, research demands increasing and tutor-to-student ratios worsening, is it now time for more universities to consider whether the recruitment of part-time tutors (retired academics or other professionals, for instance) may offer a cost-effective means of providing the kind of personalised contact that many students feel they are lacking at present?
Derek Rowntree is former professor of educational development, The Open University.
Readers' comments
Surely one key consideration in regards to the Open University is what students on their courses expect from them. If a student goes to another University they don't only get grades and comments but also pastoral care and the opportunity to build-up relationships with classmates and lecturers; Open University students surely miss out on much of this side of the experience but having signed-up expecting to miss out on it they don't object to the loss. I know from experience that so much less can be communicated via email and meanings can also be lost if not accompanied by body language. Human contact is a key part of University and one even more crucial when 18 year olds are required to study much more independently than they are accustomed to at A level. Yes getting others to talk to students can help but students need to be able to interact with their lecturers and the fact that it may be cheaper for them to do so less does not justify reducing the quality of an experience that previous generations could take for granted.
There's a lot of sad truth in the above comment (although online interaction can be pretty intense and has vastly reduced the lonelinesss of the long-distance student). However, close interaction with a lecturer is fast disappearing from the new mass-production campus (not that I remember much of it 50 years ago) and all I am asking is, can we at least try to fill the gap with a resource that has been greatly appreciated by a couple of million students already.
I would just like to point out that this article seems to be based on a mistaken assumption that distance learning with the Open University does not mean that studnets do not get contact with their tutors, nor does it mean that no pastoral support is available. I do therefore wonder which courses Professor Rowntree taught with the Open University - face to face contact at level two and three is not as frequent as at Foundation level. As an OU Assosciate Lecturer who teaches on the Social Sciences Foundation ourse DD100 I would just like to point out that contact with students at tutorials and 'pastoral care' are every bit as relevent in the Open University as they are in the 'red brick' University at which I studied. I also have fond memories of the support and encouragement given to me by my tutors on the various courses which I have studied with the Open University. To support struggling students I am able to request addition face to face support in the form of one to one sessions or additional tutorials with those students who need it, and am able to draw on specialist support for students with difficulties which impact on their studies. It is probably for these reasons that measures of 'student satisfaction' with the Open University are so high. What is deeply worrying is that proposed changes to Government funding will impact severly on the level of services which the University can offer to students and may make 'distance learning' with the Open University more like the model described in the article by Prof Rowntree. The level of cuts is so severe that it will have a profound and detrimental impact on the way teaching is delivered by the Open University, and will inevitable mean fewer tutors, courses delivered solely 'online' using software platforms like MOODLE, FLASH and ELLUMINATE, and inevitably higher 'dropout' rates as students who find these teaching methods difficult become isolated and demoralised. The Government needs a serious wake up call, and must take on board that the most effective and accessible University in the World (and yes the OU does have a Global footprint) is about to be dealt a serious blow because of their ill conceived policy changes which were introduced without any real consultation, and with no consideration of the consequences which will inevitably follow. Philip Hill
Face to face contact at the OU? I did mention "occasional face-to-face sessions" if students can manage to attend. And I would not deny the enormous benefit of summer schools and the kind of remedial sessions for struggling students organised by enterprising tutors like Philip Hill. But face to face support was rarely seen as a priority by most students on a course and anyway becomes increasingly rare at second and third level. That is why I suggest that, for the great majority of OU students, it was the distance feedback and encouragement from someone who cares about and understands their learning (rather than face to face remedial sessions) that made their OU experience so satisfying. Like Philip Hill I dread the possibility that current Government cuts will lead to fewer tutors and formative feedback in favour of more and more information delivery (online or otherwise).