The Conceptual Failure of Higher Education Policy, Part One: Quality Assurance and Taxonomization

The first of a two part essay that reconsiders the nature and purpose of higher education and academic activity. Starting with a consideration of the neo-conceptual technical entities currently defining the debate, and considering their implications and limitations. Leading to the conclusion that a philsophical reconsideration of higher education is necessary.

Over the last week I have been engaged in an online debate with some of the key players in the development of new and exciting technologies that promise some radical changes in the British education system. Initially, my challenge was for a justification of the effort currently being put into making interoperable systems underpinned with universally defined schemas and taxonomies. Along the way, this debate has highlighted the different conceptions of the purpose and nature of education, especially higher education, forming often unstated assumptions guiding these developments. It has become clear that some of these assumptions may be contradictory. Whilst others are certainly not shared by the key actors involved. The most significant conflict being that between students and education providers. It is argued that the former are increasingly only interested in attaining a certain grade, whilst the latter are increasingly focussed upon providing a richer and more relevant set of skills and abilities during the educational process, regardless of the actual grade achieved. This may be seen as a basic contradiction within British higher education.

Lets try and get out of the quandary then, or at least try to understand it. My conjecture is this: British universities are still culturally powerful enough to redefine the purpose of the education that they offer, and to achieve a consensus amongst staff, students and the wider public. But they are failing to do so, and this is due to a conceptual failure.

There is in fact a remarkable political, cultural and commercial alliance calling for this 'revolution' to happen. It is almost dogmatically accepted that to maintain our economic position we must occupy the role of 'innovator' and 'inventor'. In fact we must be world leaders in 'creativity'. This is, in part, a response to the ease with which manufacturing processes can now be replicated anywhere in the world, along with a belief that the forces behind that change (invention of products and markets) are still beyond the third-world countries to which production has migrated (this is itself a myth, but that doesn't undermine the argument behind the calls for change). It is also a response to the perception that, as Ken Robinson has stated (Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Capstone 2001), the global rate of change is increasing all of the time, and therefore societies and economies must become better at dealing with change. This is understood to mean that we need to become dynamic people, a society whose expertise is in change itself. And in order to become such a society, we need an education system that teaches creativity, independence, team-working, innovation, self-reflection, and all kinds of 'skills' towards the top end of Bloom's taxonomy.

But this is just not happening. Or at least we can say that there is a tendency to demand and supply a simpler, less active education process. A process closer to the transmit-consume-repeat loop of the stereotypical American higher education that we deride so much (of course that is just a stereotype). As Scott Wilson argues (see comments in a previous entry in my blog), for some time British students have been overtly degree-grade focussed. Of course in reality the grade matters, no one denies that. But only as an indicator of the quality of the process carried out to achieve the grade. What we are seeing is the connection between the result and the process becoming weakened, in reality and in the conceptual model that students have of the educational process. This is confirmed to me constantly in discussions with both students and staff concerning the use of IT to improve the process. We have means for improving research, study and PDP skills of all kinds. But unless those activities contribute directly to the end product grade, with extra marks being available, students are reluctant to take part. Alarmingly, last week I had an interview with a student who confirmed that even in a module concerned principally with teaching research skills, the students are entirely focussed on the exam and not on the skills.

It may be useful for us to track back in time to the point at which things started to go wrong. Go back to the time when the current system was adequate. A relatively small and closely connected sector of British society were able to go to university. That minority all went through pretty much the same experience, with the same result in mind, at a small group of institutions. They then graduated into positions appointed by people who themselves had been through that process. They didn't need a detailed breakdown of the meaning of a 2.1 from Oxford. They already knew exactly what that meant. And then all of a sudden we move to a situation in which the majority of people are expected to complete a degree. And furthermore, the diversity of those degrees, both in the subjects covered and the methods used (related to the great number of institutions), necessarily expanded beyond any one person's ability to conceive. But we didn't change the grading system, or the nature of the academic process, in order to cope with that expansion. We still expect a simple degree grade to be universally meaningful in the way it was before the expansion. And that just doesn't work. But unfortunately, we have created several generations for whom simple end-product quantification is the only means for expressing both results and the objectives employed in the course to those results.

As an aside, consider the response of our short-termist politicians during these developments. Consider that, due to the nature of our political system, their sole aim is to achieve quality assurance (or at least the appearance of quality) at the lowest possible cost, in the shortest possible time. And so if they can say that the number of students achieving a high grade has increased, they will assume that quality is being achieved, and they will carry on with this claim until it is already quite clear that quality is not actually increasing with the rise in grades, and in fact may actually be falling. At which point they will switch to the next least costly system for claiming quality assurance (see below). Does that tune remind you of the early days of the Blair regime?

I am sure that we can say that the set of concepts used to understand, determine and communicate academic processes is extremely impoverished. It may even be limited to some vague notions about the differences between academic disciplines, along with the obviously meaningless degree rating system. However, that is already a well established argument. The really important question is this: do we have a richer and more effective set of concepts that can meaningfully express the kind of education that we are aiming for?

Action is of course being taken to address the problem. We are slowly moving towards more detailed reporting of the processes that constitute a degree: transcripts. Every student may ask for a transcript of their degree. But I suspect that these will just consist of a more extensive set of reports of end-product quantifiers. In what sense would a statement that as part of my degree I have completed an optional extra Creative Writing Skills Module say much about my actual abilities? Again, unless you have yourself completed a genuinely similar module, it is quite meaningless. For a short time it may have seemed that transcripts would be the solution, as the next least costly means for guaranteeing and communicating academic quality. But in reality, perhaps not.

For the next solution to the problem, we must move up a level in descriptive sophistication and cost: the ePortfolio. Essentially, an ePortfolio should be the online equivalent of a folder full of examples and evidence. In theory it provides the detail and contextualisation necessary to give meaning to the reports of end-product attainment. It could well be seen as an extension of the kind of narrative that a student may usefully give verbally about themselves and their studies. It is an extension in that it is hyperlinked, and is populated with selected content over a period of time from a wide variety of sources, and with annotations added to that content. The production of the ePortfolio may also be automated and 'scaffolded' (meaning that the student is given a structure to fill in, with the aim of teaching them how to independently create such a structure). The automation of an ePortfolio is not simply done to save the student time and effort. Rather, it is there to impose something of the institution and the wider educational establishment into the ePortfolio, into the student's narrative. Automation allows for the inclusion of authoritative elements guaranteeing claims made. It is also intended to ensure that the structure of the ePortfolio, in terms of the order and relations between a predefined set of descriptors (what they call a taxonomy), is codified according to a predetermined machine readable pattern. Imagine the result if we all did have such interoperable ePortfolios held within a government computer somewhere. Imagine that one of the descriptors were 'creative act', and that this is appended to a sub set of learning activities. A civil servant could do a single query to discover the sum total of creativity in the UK over the last year. Quality. Or at least, quality spin.

This last development, the taxonomization of learning (of which the interoperable ePortfolio, the VLE and other learning technologies are merely Trojan horses), brings us up to the present. It offers to be the next least expensive solution to the problem of quality assurance and quality reporting in higher education. Politicians like it, as it gives standardization and quality assurance, but without them having to do very much. The work is devolved to the learners themselves. The technologists promote it because it gives them a chance to get some really neat tools deployed at every point in the education system. But should we in higher education be as enthusiastic? At first it seems to solve the problems outlined above. It will provide a means of precisely stating the nature and value of degrees in relation to school and college education, and onwards to careers and CPD. It gives the possibility for that restatement of higher education with which this paper began, reaching the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy (the activities of 'higher' intelligence). And furthermore, it will refocus the student on the acquisition, during their studies, of those higher skills. Hoorah for taxonomies.

And so we have the construction of what might be a univocal language of learning. Within the educational space over which it is placed, any single activity may be codified, transmitted to another seemingly un-connected location, and de-coded to make perfect sense. But first of all we must learn the language. And when I say we, I mean everyone. If we are seeking to encourage independent, self-directed, reflective learning, that everyone includes the learners themselves. They must all speak the taxonomy. Perhaps in a simplified and filtered dialect, but always with their goals, processes, reasons, progress and achievements translatable into the taxonomy. It acts as the educational infrastructure, the architecture of learning with which even a 2.1 from Oxford (as an example of an abstract educational entity) may be meaningfully coded for the consumption of the Secretary of State for Education, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Daily Mail or the 'wider electorate'.

But what kind of architecture is it? A kind of prefabrication system, with components that can be taken anywhere and reconstructed according to the specifications guiding their placement and interconnection. A perfectly portable and reproducible system, that can be easily communicated. And furthermore, as the system has been intelligently designed with components that encapsulate certain 'constructivist' concepts of learning, wherever such a building is assembled, the learner cannot help but learn in the right way, according to those concepts. The architecture as such is axiomatic. Or in edu-speak, it provides the scaffolding for good learning.

Scaffolding is a good metaphor. It wraps around (and sometimes within) a building in the process of construction. The scaffolding in a way shapes the building, guides it, but becomes invisible. It gets assembled, dismantled and extended where appropriate as the building grows. And at some point, is no longer required, as the pattern to which it has been working becomes internalized into the building. Then, the more difficult fine detail of the building can be worked upon.

Unfortunately, it seems that students often don't understand that we want them to be concerned with the building and not the scaffolding. This might be a result of the following:

1. understanding and navigating the scaffolding is itself a major achievement;
2. but understanding the scaffolding is still a quicker win than actually creating the building;
3. everyone has the same experience of the scaffolding, but they are all creating different buildings, so there's less of a shared understanding of the building;
4. it's the scaffolding that is provided by the authorities, not the building;
5. consequently, we end up rewarding them for understanding the scaffolding, not for the building or for the process of building;
6. so at some point along the way, the building is forgotten and all we are left with is the scaffolding.

Or in other words, the ability to speak the taxonomy, to carry out activities that are validated through assigning them to nodes in the taxonomical tree, becomes the most important aim of learning. In this way, 'working to the assessment criteria' takes on a new meaning, with the outcomes being better documented and more thoroughly standardized, but at the same time increasingly vacuous and self-serving. The end of taxonomizing is for it to say too much about itself, about its order, and nothing about concepts that connect and do work beyond that order. Taxonomies are filled with words that eventually act too much as order-words and too little as concepts. And that leaves us in a position little advanced from the conceptual failure with which we started. The politicians and technologists may be happy for a while, but the questions will return. What is higher education about? What are its results? Where is its quality? What difference does it make?

In the second part of this essay I will look more closely at the nature of the various academic processes of science, arts and philosophy. I will argue that in order to recognize, reward and encourage these activities, a new set of concepts is required. Concepts more precise and more closely related to the many distinct activities within the various disciplines. This moves in the opposite direction of much recent educational theorizing. Away from generality of taxonomy and towards the value located in each discipline. But at the same time, I will aim to describe an absolutely minimal set of concepts that do provide some common ground between the disciplines, albeit not that of the short-termist politicians and their desire for simple quality assurance. This will itself require a reconsideration of the question 'what is a concept?' – the answer itself being closer to real academic activity, and the production of conjectures, design patterns, working assumptions, and critical and creative thought embedded and emergent from more vital academic ecologies.

: 08 Jun 2005 21:59 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem