On the vagaries of workload models

Recent discussion of the “mutant” algorithm blamed for the 2020 A level prompted me to undertake a sideways rumination on the vagaries of workload models. I am not reflecting here on the TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) data collected annually by universities, and which has a whole hornets’ nest of its own issues (some of which are discussed by David Kernohan in this 2019 WONKHE article). I am thinking instead of the ways in which institutions increasingly attempt to align the work undertaken by an individual to the criteria stated in their contract.

A case for the importance of documenting workloads can be made on the grounds of parity and fairness. Sadly, the reality is that forensic bean-counting rarely captures the nuances of real-life working.

Are we entering a golden era of sharing and collaboration in HE?

There is no doubt that the Covid pandemic has added unwanted complexity to a Higher Education sector that was already facing a number of significant difficulties. It does seem, however, that adversity can be the mother of invention and I am encouraged by the emergence of a couple of mechanisms for grassroots sharing of teaching ideas and resources.

Lecturemotely (https://www.lecturemotely.com) includes sections on teaching, assessment and student support for the Covid-era

Firstly, and I’ve mentioned this tangentially previously, there is the #DryLabsRealScience network. This is now part of the broader Lecturemotely collection of resources. The latter has been developed by bioscience academics at De Montfort University as a response to the sudden need to switch teaching and assessment online.

The POSTnote Assignment: Preparing a scientific report to Government as an authentic alternative to essay writing

I recently found time to write an outline of an activity I ran for a few years on a second year module. As an alternative to writing a traditional essay, students were asked to produce a POSTnote (my notes can be found here). POSTnotes are briefings for members of the UK House of Commons and/or House of Lords, produced by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

This was a nice task, an “authentic assessment” with real-world relevance, in which the students developed literature searching skills, an ability to write for a non-expert audience and an awareness of ways in which Government policy can be developed and informed.

Sadly, an increase in the number of students on the relevant module made the activity unsustainable. I am, however, aware of at least three UK HEIs that are now running a task based on this model, so I include the notes in the hope that they can be useful for colleagues at additional universities. Please feel free to contact me for more details.

See the detailed description of the task at
here

UPDATE (19th August): Thanks to a prompt from colleague Prof Graham Scott (Hull), I became aware of the new National Teaching Repository (housed at Edge Hill). I deposited this work there, snd ss a result it now has a DOI https://doi.org/10.25416/edgehill.12826526.v2