Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 8 | Page 72

EDITOR’S EPILOGUE | 73
72 | JADE
Capture taking the spotlight as contentious issues he admitted had
still not been solved at Aberystwyth. Regardless of these occasional
political hand grenades, he had dealt with other issues broadly be
ensuring consistency across his institute, which he admitted was an
aspirational goal rather than a realistic one. He was extremely open
with the NSS data from his own institute, showing its less-than-stellar
track record over the last few years and the positive impact his changes
towards improving staff morale had on the latest figures….a significant
upturn for their NSS scores. One of his tactics had been to fund and
politically support seventeen different academic-led projects aimed at
troubleshooting their historical NSS performance and use the outputs of
these projects to inform institutional learning and teaching strategy. He
also detailed a “tell-us-now” student voice mechanism which boasted
a 24 hour response policy to queries. Prof. Grattan was brutally honest
and slightly dismissive of what he termed “autopsy data” referring to
action after an issue had taken place and postulated that his 24 hour
service, whilst initially opposed by many of his colleagues, produced
results in terms of student satisfaction.
other (Dr. Peter Chatterton, Education Management Consultant; Prof.
Susannah Quinsee, University of London; and Prof. Gunter Saunders,
University of Westminster). In the plus column, this stylised session
allowed the guests to share volumes of their opinions in a 360 degree
discussion of teaching practice. In the minus column, it was difficult
to follow at points and one of the three speakers was consistently
overshadowed by the other two. The emergent points from the “chat”
were as follows:
His point was that many of the easy or quick fixes to “hygiene factors”
(ie, todays problems fixed today) translated into enhanced satisfaction
and enhanced inter-school consistency of student experience across
his institute. This was shown to be directly responsible for the upturn
in their NSS scores in 2016 resulting in staff engagement with his plans
moving forward. • The relative benefits of novelty value vs. incremental improvement
of teaching practice and which leads to the best outcomes for
learners with a view that it was a balance that is most effective “on
the ground”.
• Necessity as a driver of excellence in teaching, where teachers
are self-selecting pedagogic methods based on their strengths
and weaknesses, framed using flipped classroom pedagogy as an
alternative for teachers who struggle to give “good” lectures.
• Institutional logistics and cultures as a barrier or an aid to
dissemination of best practice and innovation. This one led to
a fantastic debate about the paradoxical reduction in student
satisfaction that sometimes come after a particularly innovative
module once the less-exciting status quo is re-exerted in the
classroom… an interesting argument against too much early
adoption and a convincing reason to develop these innovations at
the “whole institute” level rather than in pockets.
Whilst listening to this interesting talk, I was thinking that this was an
idea that Keele could modify with relative ease. Given our size, existing
good communication infrastructures and general Keele supportive
environment, we might consider how we could do these things
“smarter” rather than “better” which might be the definition of an
impactful quick-win for us. His points all converged on the idea that institutional centres of learning
and teaching should be themselves innovating but even more critical,
he thought they should have an active role to play in transferability of
others innovations from the individual and school level outwards to the
whole institute level. Many centres already do this and I think his point
was that they should feel empowered to do more.
Questions from this Keynote centred on noting that this change in
Aberystwyth’s leadership ethos required a great deal of confidence and
trust in colleagues, shifting firmly to a quality enhancement (QE) model
of management away from their pre-existing quality assurance (QA)
model. Again, this is pretty much where Keele is already and it would be
relatively easy to enhance this by looking for ways to further empower
our own staff towards even greater excellence. The overall message from the various discussants was that technology
enhanced learning solutions needed to be simple and quick in order to
have the widest impacts and greatest benefits at the big picture level.
A Fireside Chat
The next keynote was a very unusual “fireside chat” with Prof.
Thirunamachandran facilitating (Paxman-esque!) a three-way scripted
conversation between three guests who were already familiar with each
The questions from this session focussed on the barriers to these various
ideas, the most prominent of which was “time”. There is an adjustment
period for teachers new in HE, where subject experts are required to
become pedagogical practitioners “on the side” and compounded
when “innovation” is perceived as a way to smooth this requirement.
The emerging agreement within the room was that “incremental
improvement” rather than sweeping drastic changes were a safer and
more pedagogically-informed way to develop innovation in an institute.
The agreement from the audience was that technology for its own sake