Teaching & Learning: Perspectives on the Business of Business Schools – Part 2

by bay12studio | 5 Nov, 2019 | News & Insights, Teaching & Learning

So where to start? Well with student numbers obviously …

1) Student demand: the obsession to beat all obsessions
“Are we on track to meet the coming year’s target?” is the perpetual nagging question in the mind of a Dean immediately the current year’s cohort is registered. This is the key dimension on which business schools – and by extension – the Dean is judged by university management, especially given the role of business schools to generate a surplus to support STEM disciplines a source of constant pressure. So, data on evolving patterns and trends of student demand, nationally and globally, the performance and activities of our “competitor set” is the inevitable starting point for any Dean’s thinking on teaching. Many other obsessions flow from this underlying issue – league tables, graduate outcomes, student satisfaction being the most obvious.

Alongside the obsession with the schools overall numbers is the shape of demand across the range of programmes offered by the school. What’s up, what’s down, what are the budgetary implications for individual departments, what is the impact on the overall shape of the school, what is the impact on space and staffing requirements. Within programmes what is the mix of students, most notably in the UK, setting the balance of domestic and international students and how to handle the risk of a high proportion of students from certain international markets. Inevitably this student mix has implications for the student experience, the suitability of particular pedagogical approaches, the need for specialist student support (e.g. language support). The juggling of competing pressures around student numbers is the daily bread of a Dean.

2) Government policy and regulation (what’s the next rabbit out the hat?)
As any Dean will instantly recognise business schools operate in a highly regulated environment and one where changes in government policy are increasingly frequent. Academics are blessedly free from wrestling with changes in government policy. Yes, it ultimately impinges on their activities, but they don’t have the same exposure, the same need to consider how to anticipate the impact of policy developments. It comes into sharp relief in meetings where faculty eyes glaze over as you outline the latest policy changes and the first question from academic colleagues is “okay so what are you going to do about the IT failures in the classroom”.

Obviously, policy and regulation are specific to individual countries, but it is worth using the case of the United Kingdom to illustrate the concerns relating to learning and teaching with which Deans may have to wrestle. The fundamental shift in the UK has been in the transferring of the cost of higher education from the state to the student, through the introduction of student fees, to the positioning of students as consumers. This shift has fundamentally affected teaching in business schools. Firstly, the removal of the limit on undergraduate student numbers created a competitive free-for-all in student recruitment leading to significant growth opportunities for some and painful reduction in demand for others. Secondly, the regulatory infrastructure has been radically reshaped with the replacement of a sector led regulator with the “Office for Students” possessing highly intrusive powers and being mandated to safeguard student (consumer) rights with a particular emphasis on value for money and student outcomes. The introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) lies at the core of this regulation, with Universities and soon individual disciplinary areas, being awarded Gold to Bronze ratings on the basis of performance against a set of measures relating to teaching and the student experience.

These changes impact on all dimensions of learning and teaching, indeed all aspects of the student experience. Level of contact hours, indicators of student satisfaction, measures of graduate outcomes teaching qualifications of staff. The T&L obsession of Deans is about meeting metrics demanded by regulators, and that’s before needing to deal with the metrics we joyously impose on ourselves via league tables and accreditation.

3) League tables and rankings (that particular temple of pain)
The past three decades have spawned a growth industry in league tables at university, and particularly business school, level. Any conversation involving senior staff in universities or business schools will very rapidly move onto league tables, despite the constant invocation the “we mustn’t be driven by league tables”. The significance of rankings (and their potentially deleterious effects) have been amply illustrated by events in a nameless US business school over the past year.

While rankings comprise a range of dimensions beyond teaching and learning including research performance, staff profile, spend per student etc, at the core are components that relate either to input factors or outcomes associated with teaching and learning activities. In terms of bachelor’s programmes, rankings tend to be nationally specific and reflect the peculiarities of that particular system. In the United Kingdom across the three main league tables – the Complete Guide, the Guardian, and the Times/Sunday Times – the teaching and learning dimensions cluster around entry standards, student-staff ratios, student satisfaction, and graduate prospects. Turning to master’s programmes, rankings abound – the Financial Times, Business Week, the Economist, Forbes etc. These rankings tend to be more international although given the scale of the United States business school market certain rankings tend to be heavily US centric. However, in terms of dimensions there is a high degree of commonality, but a commonality which differently weighted to that in bachelors rankings. Taking the Financial Times as an exemplar of these master’s rankings, the overwhelming emphasis is on salary and career outcomes – particularly salary gain – with lesser weight on staff and student quality and diversity.

For Deans these dimensions are critical touch-points with teaching and learning agendas. “How will this initiative improve our performance in league tables?” “What are we doing to improve graduate outcomes” are common and consistent components of the Dean’s engagement with colleagues around teaching. For frontline academics, as with policy and regulation, this obsession may feel alien and remote (not to mention unhealthy) but it is a lens through which Deans view the world. The obsessions are derivative, and Deans may regularly jibe against them but when the Vice Chancellor or Provost questions the School’s league table performance they are very real and will inevitably cascade down into influencing the delivery of programmes and hence impact the lives of academic colleagues.

For Deans these dimensions are critical touch-points with teaching and learning agendas. “How will this initiative improve our performance in league tables?” “What are we doing to improve graduate outcomes” are common and consistent components of the Dean’s engagement with colleagues around teaching. For frontline academics, as with policy and regulation, this obsession may feel alien and remote (not to mention unhealthy) but it is a lens through which Deans view the world. The obsessions are derivative, and Deans may regularly jibe against them but when the Vice Chancellor or Provost questions the School’s league table performance they are very real and will inevitably cascade down into influencing the delivery of programmes and hence impact the lives of academic colleagues.

Author
Angus Laing, Co-Founder & Chairman Nurture Higher Education Group

Teaching & Learning: Perspectives on the Business of Business Schools – Part 1

by bay12studio | 17 May, 2019 | News & Insights, Teaching & Learning

Perspective matters. Perspective shapes perceptions. Perspective shapes priorities. It shapes our view of the world we inhabit and what we consider appropriate courses of action to pursue. Differing perspectives can result in misunderstanding, even mutual incomprehension.

Imagine the perspectives of two tourists visiting the same location. The tourist taking the walking trail can see the detail of the flora and fauna surrounding them, they can feel the texture of the soil, they can hear the sound of running water. But they cannot see over the trees, they cannot see beyond the ridge adjacent to the trail. By contrast the tourist taking the helicopter tour can see over the trees, they can see beyond the ridge, yet they cannot feel the soil, hear the water, see the detail of the flora and fauna.

Now imagine the respective perspectives of the academic in the classroom, and the Dean (to be entirely clichéd) in the office. The academic understands the nature of the students in the class, can feel their engagement (or not) with the material, is focused on developing the student’s disciplinary knowledge, is concerned at a personal level with student satisfaction. It is a fine-grained perspective which is focused on the individualised encounter of the academics with identifiable students. The Dean by contrast is conscious of overall levels of student demand, of the expectations of value and outcomes of students, is concerned with league table rankings. It is course-grained perspective, which is focused on the collective encounter of anonymised students with the School.

Both are in the same “location”, they both are concerned with student learning and the delivery of teaching, but their perspectives are very different. In turn their obsessions are very different. While the increasingly ready accessibility of large amounts of student data enables both the academic and the Dean to an increasing degree to “see over the ridge” and “see the detail of the flora” respectively, the experiential perspective is very different. For the academic it is in the classroom, it is with disciplinary peers. For the Dean it in spreadsheets, it is with the Provost. Their respective obsessions reflect these experiences.

Yet Deans’ invariably have been the academic in the classroom at an earlier point in their career. That early classroom experience, that nostalgic recollection of “walking the trail”, remains an influence on their thinking even though they are now “in the helicopter”. It contributes to the way in which they interpret evidence, the inferences they draw, even though the pace of change may make such formative experience redundant. The potential danger of the Dean’s “when I was teaching …” reflection cannot be underestimated, the climate has changed, the soil will feel different, the river may be dry.

Shuttling between these perspectives and coping with the obsessions of each party (as well as potentially the redundant experience of the Dean) is the Associate Dean with responsibility for teaching along with the cadre of Programme Directors. Their sense making of the twin perspectives is critical in shaping the learning and teaching agendas in business schools. Their challenge is to mesh the experiential reality of frontline academic colleagues with the potentially very different experiential reality of the Dean. Into this the Associate Dean brings their own particular expertise and experiences, in particular adding a wider cross-university perspective into the mix.

So, what then are the main strands of that reality for the Dean, what is real when looking at the teaching and learning landscape from the (dis)advantage point of the helicopter? What then are the obsessions that stalk Deans waking hours? Inevitably such a list of obsessions reflects personal experience of leading two business schools in the United Kingdom. However, from the privileged position of observing business schools across multiple jurisdictions through both accreditation panels and the development of Nurture HE initiatives, one is struck by the commonality of the core themes and issues. It is somewhat like watching a play with which you are familiar, say Macbeth, the stage set, the actors, the director may all be different, but the plot line remains fundamentally constant irrespective of where the play is being staged.

Acknowledging this particular experiential base, any compilation of top obsessions of Deans with teaching and learning would almost certainly encompass the following:

• Student demand
• Policy and regulation
• League tables and rankings
• Student satisfaction
• Graduate outcomes
• Accreditation
• Efficiency
• Innovation Space and facilities

Although this is by no means either an exhaustive list (“how long have you got?”) or an authoritative one (“it’s his rather peculiar view of the world”), running this past fellow deans brings painful nods, rueful agreement about our obsessions and a sense that we inhabit a world that is both very detached from that of our frontline colleagues but at the same time ultimately focused on the same core objectives.

Over the next few weeks we are going to be delving into each of these obsessions and reflecting on what they mean for deans, and indeed colleagues across business schools for whom such obsessions inevitably feel remote and potentially disconnected from their experience of reality. For Nurture HE these issues lie at the very heart of our commitment to developing and delivering high quality affordable business education globally. Our focus is on delivering status, real returns and participation in a global community through the Goal Business Education proposition. This proposition is underpinned by delivering outstanding graduate outcomes and exceptional student satisfaction while supporting our delivery partners on the journey towards accreditation.

Author
Angus Laing, Co-Founder & Chairman Nurture Higher Education Group