Author: Tansy Jessop

Bristol Students’ Union is celebrating its centenary and has entered a new phase in its joint working with the University. Professor Tansy Jessop, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Students, reflects on the evolution of our partnership and the issues that Bristol SU and the University’s Executive Board (UEB) are addressing together, thanks to the annual SU-UEB agreements. 

As Bristol SU turns 100, it’s an exciting time to be working with them; our relationship has matured, on both sides, and we’re working much more in tandem. It’s proving to be positive and productive. 

The COVID-19 pandemic reset our relationship as a genuine partnership. We needed to check in regularly with the SU’s Full-Time Elected Officers, since they’re one of our key routes into the student community. Those lines of communication, and the recognition that we have shared concerns, have persisted. 

Bristol SU’s move into Senate House has positioned them at the heart of the Clifton campus, in much closer proximity to students and to the UEB (and within easy reach of a good coffee!). The SU itself has a fantastic induction for its Elected Officers and has gained real traction with the student community, as witnessed by the record-breaking voter turnout for the SU Elections and an increase in attendance at Welcome Week.  

What co-creation looks like

Co-creation is blossoming at Bristol. Here are a few examples. 

Last year, we launched a wonderful partnership between staff and student representatives, co-led by Catherine Hindson, Director of Quality and Mia Stevens, Undergraduate Education Officer, and supported by the SU and Academic Quality and Policy Office (AQPO). It’s called the Student Academic Representation Network (SARN). This isn’t just a talking shop – it’s vibrant. The most recent meeting had over a hundred people in the room, from student reps to School Education Directors to Professional Services colleagues in our schools. The network is sparking new relationships and discussions and leading to fresh approaches to Student Staff Liaison Committees, for example. 

The Elected SU Officers are co-creating solutions on the ground, too. Last year the  Undergraduate Education Officer, Nicole Antoine, advocated for a digital study space finder as part of the UEB-SU agreement (see below). There was an app in development, but Nicole thought this would take longer than her tenure, so she met with Library Services and IT Services, and they worked out a method of manually inputting details of vacant spaces across campus. They designed an online study space navigator, and the day it went live, it had 14,000 hits from students. This resource continues to be very successful. 

The Bristol SU-UEB agreement

We introduced annual agreements at the instigation of our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Evelyn Welch, a couple of years ago. We try to set targets that are achievable and measurable, and we have regular contact between the SU Officers and their UEB counterparts. They take us through the progress they’re making, what the blockers are and what help they need from us. Some of these conversations have to be long-term.  

The SU Officers’ priorities as framed in this year’s agreement – and directly informed by students via the Big Bristol SU Survey and other channels – come under three themes: Student Poverty, Academic Satisfaction and Collective Wellbeing. There are ambitious proposals as well as more easily achievable ones. 

In the latter category, there’s ‘Borrow a Blazer’ – a wonderful idea to help students who’ve been called to an interview. We’re asking staff and others to donate blazers to the Careers Service so that students don’t have to buy one for the occasion.  

Some priorities are knotty to solve. One is student housing – the cost of it, and the hoops you must jump through. To get a guarantor for a tenancy agreement is challenging if you don’t have support from family or carers. This year, the Officers’ pitch to UEB has focused on supporting international students and those who have more challenges in the housing market. This is a long-term priority which is difficult for the university to solve, but we’re working through it in partnership. 

Another priority concerns buses, particularly exam buses from Stoke Bishop to the Clifton campus during the examinations period. There are other great ideas, like introducing more sensory rooms similar to the one in Senate House (which is peace on Earth, by the way! Bean bags, bubbling water, forest visuals… no wonder it gets a lot of demand). Could we dot them around campus for more students who are in particular need? We’re working on that one at the moment. We operate in a financially constrained environment, so what can we afford? Our sustained commitment to subsidising food at our Source cafés has been helpful to students struggling to make ends meet. Our partnership involves a lot of back-and-forth, but we’re determined to make real progress. 

Getting traction

The SU Officers are doing so much great work at the moment: running student focus groups and workshops on how we can improve our NSS scores on feedback and marking criteria; working with our Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) oversight board, and with our Study Skills team on accessibility and learning outcomes; seeking more commitments to postgraduate scholarships. Excitingly, it all involves a lot of co-production and collaboration. We’re beginning to see the fruits of this work with improvements in our Student Voice results in the NSS, and I hope that’s just the start. 

I’d also love to see a greater understanding among academics and students about what Bristol SU really does. Besides everything I’ve talked about, the SU does a beautiful job of creating a sense of belonging.  

We invest a great deal in the student experience because we want it to be genuinely transformative for our students, both personally and academically, so that they leave us as graduates ready to make a difference to society and to the planet. I’m so pleased and proud of our relationship with Bristol SU as we celebrate its 100-year mark!   

To learn more about Bristol SU and its work, watch ‘We Are Bristol SU’ on YouTube. 

 

Reading the national press, you might think that universities had just performed the last rites over centuries of in-person and on-campus teaching.

The argument being peddled by journalists whose experience of lectures was clearly more inspirational than mine, is somewhat simplistic and misleading. It suggests that a curriculum without live lectures equates to the end of all in-person teaching, as if practicals, laboratories, seminars, and tutorials do not count. Headline catching it may be; true it is not.

There are good arguments why universities are putting lectures online. Any university which has a vague interest in keeping the R rate down and being public health spirited would not wish to cram 400 students into a large airless lecture mimicking a static version of the Diamond Princess, but with younger passengers.

Kill the sacred lecture cow

But the naivety of the journalists’ critique is not about public health, it’s about what counts as higher education, and the totemic status of lectures. Anyone who has worked within an inch of higher education in the last 10 to 15 years will know that attendance at live lectures has dwindled dramatically since the installation of lecture capture which records the dulcet or droning tones of a lecture.

Students vote with their feet, and when there is no value added of engagement, interaction or inspiration, they prefer to flick open their laptops and watch the lecture at a speed and time that suits them, fast-forwarding when they are bored, and replaying when they need to rehearse the material to grasp a tricky concept.

Long before the dawn of lecture capture, Graham Gibbs wrote a swingeing critique of this most venerated of teaching genres, entitled “Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing”. His argument, in a nutshell, was that students learn very little from most of their lectures. This argument has been borne out by Astin’s research in the USA, which demonstrated that student involvement and “close contact” with lecturers and other students was the stuff of learning in higher education.

Until the virus struck, online education was largely the preserve of the Open University. No other university would have chosen to offer online education as the way to sustain some or all of its provision.

Here and there, various universities had made forays into the digital, without allowing it to affect the primacy of traditional teaching approaches. Most older universities persisted with the convention of sepia-toned lectures in the rarefied atmosphere of wood-panelled rooms; some, both old and new, stretched the convention into funky new buildings which hinted at digital futures.

In yesterday’s world, groups of students trudged up hills and crowded in corridors holding laptops in one hand, lattes in the other. They listened, took notes (or not), made halting attempts to participate, even venturing one or two questions in the lecture halls, while others, more confident, dominated conversations in seminars.

Many endured a long silence: listening, waiting, and watching. In applied subjects, students often made a more vibrant entry into disciplinary conversations, whether through building model bridges in civil engineering, or rehearsing a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For most, conversations occurred in halls or houses of multiple occupancy, or through clubs and societies and at social gatherings.

Normal was the problem

This was higher education in the UK as we knew it before the new normal. We will all have some nostalgia for the way things were. But as many commentators have argued – “we cannot return to normal, because normal was the problem.”

Don’t get me wrong here – in person teaching is clearly a brilliant way of teaching, with all its nuance, spontaneity, sense-checking, embodiment and thrill of performance. Students in face to face contexts may enjoy an expansive experience of chatting on the way to class, in the library and laboratory, and in various hang outs, where so many deep conversations take place. This shapes who students are and who they become.

But I’m not sure universities had grasped the full potential of face to face education before the shutters came down on 23 March. Certainly, many lectures were patchily attended and caught in a strange time-warp.

Online education is showing me and my colleagues some fantastic things that we can do so much better and will, I hope, shape our practice as teachers in higher education forever. At the University of Bristol, we are running a series of digital design courses, and we have about 50 digital champions in schools working with the central Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Today I was in a session with nearly 200 academics, and they were reflecting on their “Aha!” moments about online education from the emergency online pivot. Among this sample, some green shoots are poking through the rough ground which point to the potential of the digital to do some distinctive things. The list is not exhaustive but online education seems to:

• personalise learning, with students working at their own pace and thoughtfully going back to material in their own time
• trigger a shift from content-driven curricula (the idea of ‘covering content’) to carefully structured and selective bite-sized lectures with engaging tasks which help students get to grips with concepts
• draw out different voices and invite questions from students who do not routinely contribute to discussion in face to face sessions – when done well, it seems to be more inclusive
• prompt student engagement, agency and autonomy
• take the focus off assessment and enable more learning through carefully designed tasks
• promote participation, writing, and an enduring kind of community.

This all may sound a bit utopian in our decidedly dystopian world, but I want to make a case for shifting the narrative about online education from a deficit one.

It’s different from in-person education, and it struggles to replicate practice-based activities, and the human interactions you need to develop the skills to become a dentist, for example. But we need to find ways to ensure that we see some advantages to this different (albeit unchosen) mode of education and garner the benefits of its particular world of possibilities. From my interactions with colleagues, the most striking possibility is that the conversation has crept from the corridors and into the classroom, and that may be a very rich thing indeed.

As we set our faces to an uncertain and hybrid educational future in September, the community of academics at the University of Bristol is proud of its efforts at online education, and excited at the fresh educational winds blowing in our direction.

It won’t be easy; it won’t be cheap; but our online education won’t be a paltry imitation of old and tired genres like the lecture. And we are saving the best kinds of interaction which enable students to learn the most, for on campus teaching in small groups and in laboratories, on a scale that Covid-19 will allow, and in ways that our scientific invention might enable.