policy & reform
Let the campus
FIGHT BACK
With teaching numbers unable to match student growth, the idea of the huge university lecture has to be rethought.
By Geoff Hanmer and Richard Leonard
While K to 12 staff-to-student ratios have fallen over the past 30 years, higher education staff-to-student ratios have increased. Universities have coped by having larger and larger lecture venues, and accepting that a tutorial can consist of 20 students or more.
Massive open online courses( MOOCs) or distance education of any sort can’ t emulate the richness or diversity of a good campus based education, particularly for younger students.
However, the decrease in staff to student ratios over the past 20 years has seriously eroded the quality of student experience at our HE campuses to the point where the sector risks fatally damaging its brand.
Since 1989, when John Dawkins put the HE system on steroids, almost 350,000 full-time students have been added to the sector, nearly 30 per cent of them international.
These international students put about $ 5 billion dollars into the system annually, which has meant that the federal government has been able to reduce its funding per student in real terms and particularly in comparison with the richer OECD countries, all of which outspend Australia by large margins. The institutions which attract the largest number of international students, such as UNSW, Melbourne, Sydney and Monash are well off compared to the ones which don’ t.
If anything, staff to student ratios in Australia are likely to get worse. The government has committed to achieve the Bradley targets by 2025 and this will add at least another 150,000 full-time students to enrolments. Current funding arrangements virtually guarantee that very few additional academics will be hired to teach them.
The first thing the HE sector needs to do is admit that the lecture and tutorial-based higher education of the past is no longer
24 | February 2013 working. Professor Warren Bebbington, the vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide agrees. He recently announced a raft of changes to teaching that will deliver less lectures but a guarantee of a“ small-group experience” to students. Adelaide is doing what others have been thinking.
With almost 1 million full-time equivalent students enrolled by 2025, the Australian HE system must devise ways to successfully educate a large number of students using relatively few academics. Since the government is not going to provide extra cash, institutions must introduce new pedagogical models, or risk having their student experience damaged to the point where MOOCs and overseas competitors become a real threat, rather than an imagined one.
Almost everyone in the sector would agree that active pedagogies improve student learning outcomes compared with lectures, and yet the lecture is still the dominant model of teaching. Why? Because it’ s cheap. A lecture with 1000 students costs much less than any active pedagogy imaginable and consumes less than half as much space. A typical large lecture theatre can achieve one student for about 1.2 sq metres, whereas an active teaching setting will normally require between 3 and 4 square metres per student. Part of this is down to packing efficiency, but part is due to the need to separate working groups of students to achieve speech intelligibility and to allow academic staff to walk between tables comfortably.
Whichever way active teaching spaces are analysed, they are expensive; expensive to build and expensive to run, but in our
Open spaces encourage collaborative learning
view they are essential to ensuring that students have a good experience and can learn effectively. We also think that a large lecture theatre which students don’ t attend can’ t be considered to be cost effective.
So, how do we manage to provide active and engaging learning experiences to a very large number of students without additional government funding?
Firstly we have to face up to the parlous state of our teaching infrastructure; dark and uncomfortable lecture theatres, dilapidated classrooms and ill-equipped tutorial rooms – most of them in formats precluding active teaching styles.
Across the Australian HE sector, ARINA Hayball estimates that there are more than 500,000 teaching seats. At present, less than 10,000 seats are in active formats. Poor quality or not, this represents an investment of $ 5 billion which can’ t be thrown away.
Second, we must learn to lecture less. If lectures happened every second week, we would free up about one quarter of our existing teaching spaces. It would then be possible to adapt many existing teaching facilities to provide good active learning spaces at an affordable cost, as Hayball’ s work with the Melbourne School of Land and Environment demonstrates( see photo).
The idea of lecturing less is sometimes frightening for university managers and academics, but it is better than some of the drastic alternatives, and preserves the real advantages of a campus education. ■
Geoff Hanmer and Richard Leonard are directors of ARINA Hayball, specialist architects with a focus on higher education, community and public design.