HEFCE 99/55: Institutional learning and teaching strategies
A guide to good practice

Higher Education Funding Council for England

Professor Graham Gibbs
Centre for Higher Education Practice, The Open University

September 1999

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Contents

Executive summary

  1. This guide has been written to support institutions as they prepare their learning and teaching strategy and plan for the implementation of their strategy, in advance of responding to the HEFCE by 31 January 2000. It was written by Professor Graham Gibbs of the Centre for Higher Education Practice, the Open University and is intended to provide institutions with guidance and inspiration when developing their learning and teaching strategies. Further details about the HEFCE initiative and funding support can be found in paragraphs 15-18 and in HEFCE 99/48 published in July 1999.

  2. The guidance in this document builds on what is currently taking place, and what has been learnt by institutions, so as to share best practice. Institutions vary enormously and are at different stages of development of their strategies, and there is much to learn from others’ experience. Brief case studies have been included, drawn from a range of mainly English universities, institutes and colleges. These case studies have been anonymised.

  3. The guidance draws on a survey of current practice (Annex 1), the literature on learning and teaching (Annex 2) the literature on organisational change (Annex 3), on research into innovation in learning and teaching (Annex 4), and developments in the use of learning and teaching strategies in other countries (Annex 5).

  4. Learning and teaching strategies are not developed from a blank sheet, but build on existing institutional practice and structures, and in particular on existing mission statements, policies, quality assurance systems and change mechanisms. Such development is considered in paragraphs 33-43.

  5. There is no blueprint for learning and teaching strategies, in terms of either documentation or management and implementation. Institutions are trying to achieve different things with their strategies, and this inevitably means that strategies look very different from each other.

  6. Different types of institutions also tend to have characteristically different strategies and to implement them in different ways, though differences are not as wide as one might expect. Institutional size has more impact than institutional type. The purposes of learning and teaching strategies are considered in paragraphs 25-32.

  7. Despite these differences, there are common components to comprehensive strategies. Without some of these components it is less likely that a strategy will be implemented or will achieve what is intended. These components are considered in paragraphs 44-58.

  8. Developing a strategy that staff understand and believe in can take a considerable amount of time and effort, but without this investment it may not be possible to implement a strategy effectively.

  9. Implementing a strategy successfully may require co-ordinated action across a range of functions, policies and existing committees. One strength of the use of learning and teaching strategies is the increased co-ordination and focusing of effort to improve teaching.

  10. Implementing learning and teaching strategies requires more than a statement of policy: it requires the use of change mechanisms of varying kinds to bring about action on the ground. The most commonly used change mechanisms are considered in paragraphs 59-76.

  11. Where learning and teaching strategies are not embedded in an effective quality assurance system which has a forward-looking quality enhancement function, there may be a need to develop monitoring and evaluation to check what is being implemented and what the consequences are.

  12. The experience of implementing learning and teaching strategies over time leads to changes in their nature. The key changes include:

  13. Learning and teaching strategies have a relationship with other components of institutional planning. They sit alongside research strategies within an overall institutional mission and operational plan. They are underpinned by strategies for supporting infrastructure, such as an information strategy and an estates strategy. Giving teaching this central strategic position may involve organisational change, including new senior management positions, changes in committee structures and responsibilities, and teaching development groups at departmental level.

  14. As the development and implementation of learning and teaching strategies is an extended process involving much learning, the HEFCE will support institutions with seminars, guidance and the collation and sharing of good practice.

The institutional learning and teaching strategy initiative

  1. In July 1999 the HEFCE announced details of its learning and teaching strategy which will direct support and funds, through the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF), at three levels: the institution, the subject and the individual (HEFCE 99/48).

  2. The institutional strand of the TQEF will support higher education institutions (HEIs) in developing and implementing their own strategies for learning and teaching. The Council believes that these strategies will play a crucial role in improving learning and teaching in HE.

  3. HEFCE 99/48 sets out the definition of an effective learning and teaching strategy, guidance on the content and structure of the strategy and describes how the Council will fund the implementation of such strategies. This guide complements HEFCE 99/48 by providing good practice on the nature, content and uses of learning and teaching strategies. The guide will support HEIs in their development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of institutional learning and teaching strategies. Further examples of good practice will be available on a web-site, which may also host a ‘discussion forum’ between institutions wishing to share expertise, problems and solutions.

  4. HEFCE regional consultants will also act as a point of contact for institutions as they develop their strategies; they will provide advice on what will be funded and how it can be monitored.

Why do institutions need learning and teaching strategies?

  1. This section is concerned with the reasons for developing learning and teaching strategies. It considers:

  2. Calls for institutions to develop learning and teaching strategies have been made repeatedly in recent years. The MacFarlane Report (Committee of Scottish University Principals, 1992) analysed what it would take to bring about significant change in teaching and learning, particularly in the use of C&IT. The report recommended that institutions publish a detailed teaching and learning development strategy linked to their institutional plan:

    ‘Such strategies should include plans for implementation, in relation to quality assessment mechanisms, plans for staff development, including promotion structure in relation to excellence in teaching, and plans for funding developments from their own resources.’


  3. This concise statement encapsulates several key features of learning and teaching strategies:

  4. The Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997) identified the importance of institutions supporting the development of teaching:

    ‘The challenge of the next 20 years is to maintain the distinctiveness of learning at the higher level and to enhance teaching to improve students’ learning. Virtually all higher education institutions have mission statements which emphasise the importance of learning and teaching. Many have developed strategies and established committees or units devoted to the development of these activities. In pursuit of a national strategy of excellence, we are convinced that the enhancement and promotion of learning and teaching must be a priority for all of higher education.’ (p 115)


    Recommendation 8 states:

    ‘We recommend that, with immediate effect, all institutions of higher education give high priority to developing and implementing learning and teaching strategies which focus on the promotion of students’ learning.’(p 116)


  5. Analysis of quality assessment reports (HEFCE, 1995) has identified that the areas most commonly commented upon critically are quality enhancement and the organisational and policy context of teaching and learning. However, analysis of the way departments respond to quality assessment reports (HEFCE, 1997) has identified that institutional matters beyond the ability of departments to influence, such as the infrastructure, are those least likely to be acted upon. It takes more than departmental attention to teaching tactics to address many quality problems: it requires strategic, institution-wide action.

  6. There are a number of reasons why learning and teaching strategies might be needed today when we have managed without them in the past:

    1. The context has changed markedly, with fewer resources per student, and a wider variety of students with new and different interests and needs. The rate and scale of changes required in learning and teaching to meet the challenges posed by this context may be greater than in the past. Learning and teaching strategies are often designed to support larger scale change than individual teachers, or even departments, can bring about on their own.

    2. Infrastructures which evolved to support traditional patterns of learning and teaching may be less appropriate to some types of course delivery, such as flexible and resource-based learning, and may obstruct the changes required (see Gibbs, 1995a). Blocks to change are considered in paragraphs 87-95.

    3. New forms of teaching often involve new teaching roles and these may require new categories of staff on new conditions of service. This might involve graduate teaching assistants or learning resource advisers. It can be very difficult for departments to negotiate such new roles and associated salary structures, and to select, train and support new types of teachers, without the institution taking a strategic overview and providing a new personnel structure within which such developments can take place.

    4. Strategies may be needed to make innovations mainstream. Innovation in teaching has often been driven by the enthusiasm of excellent teachers. When most of this innovation was either within conventional parameters or at the margins, so that any associated costs were minimal, institutions could easily support such ad hoc development. The fact that there was no consistent direction to it did not matter. This is a phase of organisational change which may be necessary in order to identify which potential solutions to back, and to develop a critical mass of innovators. However, as innovation becomes more mainstream, the costs and associated structural changes cannot be accommodated for every type of innovation at once. For example, the early uses of C&IT were often expensive in terms of both development time and delivery costs, but this did not matter where there was special project funding or where the innovation was on a small scale. To move the use of C&IT into mainstream undergraduate education on a large scale requires a significant reallocation of resources and space. This investment may compete with other demands, such as to refurbish a traditional library or build lecture theatres. Institutions may not be able to absorb competing directions of change, with such significant resource implications, all at once. Learning and teaching strategies may involve choosing between such options and moving away from ad hoc, short-term innovation towards planned change with long-term resource allocation.

How do different kinds of institution use learning and teaching strategies?

  1. This section draws on analysis of current learning and teaching strategy documentation, to examine how institutions use their learning and teaching strategies. It also examines the perceived purpose of these strategies.

  2. For many institutions, the appropriate focus of a learning and teaching strategy is self-evident. They may have identified significant problems which they need to tackle with some urgency, such as declining rates of student retention. For some, the range of such problems is too wide to address simultaneously. Some strategic thinking is required to analyse the problems well enough to identify priorities in the short and long term.

  3. The most common problems addressed are:

    1. The consequences of declining resources and increased student numbers, and the strain this places on conventional approaches to learning and teaching. The specific problems resource constraints throw up vary from institution to institution, but include difficulties in giving students access to adequate learning resources, reduced social cohesion in student groups, less academic discussion, reduced access for students to tutorial assistance, and reduced frequency and volume of feedback on student progress.

    2. Increased diversity of students, especially in their educational background, so that methods such as lectures which progress through material at a pace suited to a ‘standard’ student are less appropriate. Students have varied needs for study-skills advice and support as they develop the ability to study independently.

    3. Increased assessment loads. As class sizes have increased, there have tended to be economies of scale with teaching, but not with assessment, where costs have increased in direct proportion to the numbers of students. In some courses, assessment costs now exceed teaching costs. Traditional forms of assignment with detailed tutor feedback have become unsustainable in some contexts. Strategic approaches to assessment have been developed to support learning and provide feedback at low cost while maintaining reliability of judgement.

  4. Some institutions have already analysed their context and diagnosed key problems that need addressing, and have a range of initiatives in place to address these problems. A learning and teaching strategy can help them to integrate and focus their efforts within a clear framework that is easier to manage and monitor. Often, there have been policies and initiatives pulling in different directions under the control of different committees which need to be brought together.

  5. Some institutions have already diagnosed a problem and identified an appropriate tactic for addressing it. For example one small research institute has already decided to adopt problem-based learning across its entire curriculum. Its learning and teaching strategy is concerned exclusively with exactly how to achieve this. It is much more likely that small institutions and monotechnics, without a wide range of disciplines and teaching approaches, can adopt a strategy that specifies teaching tactics. In contrast, large and diverse institutions tend not to specify any particular teaching solutions, but leave it to departments as to how to achieve appropriate changes within a strategic framework. There are exceptions to this in some new universities where, for example, resource-based learning or open learning have been identified as a desired solution, and departments have been encouraged to adopt these methods across all subjects.

  6. In contrast to a ‘problem orientation’, some institutions are oriented to a radical vision of the future – for example to the potential role of the HEI in a region as a provider of a flexible range of lifelong learning opportunities to a mature workforce. It is common for institutions to emphasise the development of students’ independent learning skills and employability skills in their learning and teaching strategy, and also to propose more flexible forms of course provision, such as open learning and work-based learning.

  7. Other institutions have not found the appropriate focus of a learning and teaching strategy so easy to identify. A well-established, research-oriented institution that does not need to use clearing to fill its student places, and has received consistently high teaching quality assessment (TQA) scores, may have different reasons for needing a learning and teaching strategy than an inner-city institution with a very diverse student body. Some institutions may argue that they have no problems that are sufficiently severe to require a strategic solution. However even here there will be sub-problems that might benefit from careful analysis and institution-wide strategic approaches. For example:

    1. Academics’ research time may be squeezed by teaching duties. It can be useful for an institution to think strategically about how time is currently spent and how it can be used most cost-effectively. Time spent marking students’ assignments may be both expensive and, given the evidence on how students use this feedback, relatively unproductive. Strategic solutions for providing useful and timely feedback economically could greatly benefit staff as well as students. The point is to make the best possible use of scarce academic time through strategic institutional decisions.

    2. Traditional personal tutor systems have often been difficult to maintain and resource. A strategic solution involving, for example, more peer support or organised study-skills development might ameliorate the consequences of this decline in personal tutoring, at modest cost, but would require a common approach across a degree scheme.

    3. A strategic approach to staff development, built around the scholarship of teaching (Boyer, 1990) and involving funding research into teaching practice, seminars and publications, might engage research-oriented academics in reviewing and developing their teaching. Aligning staff development provision with the institutional culture involves strategic thinking and planning.

    4. There may be too few academics coming forward to lead developments in teaching and learning. One obvious focus for any learning and teaching strategy is the reward system for staff. The unbalanced nature of reward systems has been well documented (Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC), 1996; NCIHE, 1997). It is not easy for departments to act independently on such matters: a new institutional approach to recognising, rewarding and promoting staff to lead changes in teaching may be required (see paragraphs 77-84).

  8. Competition to have the highest ratings for teaching quality has become more marked as ratings have been publicised and discussed. Some institutions use their learning and teaching strategy to enhance the quality of their provision as effectively as possible, without having any more specific goals. The most common quality enhancement issues addressed in current learning and teaching strategies are:

    1. More coherent and comprehensive development of students’ transferable skills, key skills, or employment skills. This may include developing new kinds of learning activities which involve the use of these skills, or changing assessment so that the development of skills is taken into account in marking or described in student profiles.

    2. More explicit specification of learning outcomes for all courses and the closer alignment of assessment to outcomes, usually involving more diverse types of assessment, with explicit and consistent criteria and more transparent standards.

    3. Alignment of internal quality assurance and quality enhancement efforts to external quality assurance demands. This may involve adopting the current Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) definition of ‘six aspects of provision’ as the framework for all internal course review, and focusing development efforts on areas where scores of less than 4 out of 4 have been achieved for any aspect of provision.

    4. Extending initial training for new full-time and part-time teachers, and continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities for experienced teachers, to meet the accreditation requirements of the ILT.

On what practice is the development of learning and teaching strategies building?

  1. Institutions have worked to improve learning and teaching long before learning and teaching strategies were developed, and strategies often grow out of existing practices and organisational structures. The most common elements already in place are considered here, with illustrations of how they are often developed as components of overarching strategies.

    Mission statements

  2. Existing institutional mission statements can provide an orientation for learning and teaching strategies and the basis for the development of goals and targets (see paragraphs 47 and 49). It is common for mission statements to be somewhat general in nature. Unless they are accompanied by more detailed objectives, some work may need to be done to tease out the implications for learning and teaching and turn these implications into action plans. For example, a mission may include the statement ‘to develop the employability of students’. Unpacking what this means may highlight three main implications: the need to develop students’ transferable skills, the need to provide work experience, and the need to provide students with an opportunity to build up a CV that documents their skills and experience. An analysis could result in the setting of targets for a learning and teaching strategy such as: ‘To develop an explicit transferable skills curriculum in every programme by 2001’ and ‘To provide every graduating student with support to build up a profile of their skills and experience from 2004’. In this sense, learning and teaching strategies operationalise and implement aspects of mission statements. Sometimes the development of a learning and teaching strategy results in some elaboration or fine-tuning of mission statements. Some existing mission statements, however, do not provide an adequate basis for the development of a learning and teaching strategy because they are too general.

    Policies

  3. Institutions have existing policies on such matters as selection of staff, initial training and accreditation of teachers, promotion and reward, course review and quality assurance, the collection of student feedback, assessment, personal tutoring and so on. Policies may not specify goals or targets, or may not be accompanied by plans for implementation and monitoring. They may also not be widely known or acted upon. But policies can be developed so that they support strategies. For example, almost all existing promotion policies state that promotion criteria include excellence in teaching, but a survey has shown that this does not commonly lead to many excellent teachers being promoted (Gibbs, 1995b). Similarly the FDTL project ‘Support for Part- Time Teachers in Sociology’ found that virtually every department surveyed was in an institution that had a policy stating that graduate teaching assistants should be provided with a mentor. However, few had implemented this policy. A learning and teaching strategy might go beyond such policy statements and set an overall goal such as ‘To balance the rewards and senior positions available to excellent teachers and excellent researchers’. A learning and teaching strategy might also go on to plan how to achieve this by, for example, setting targets for the proportion of promotions achieved primarily through teaching excellence; briefing the promotions committee on how to implement the policy (see Diamond, 1994); or setting up new categories of position, such as ‘readers in teaching’ where excellent teachers are not in direct competition with excellent researchers (see paragraph 83). Learning and teaching strategies can be used to ensure that policies are implemented.

    Committees

  4. Institutions usually already have a range of committees concerned with learning and teaching, assessment, course approval and review, promotion, student services, computing services and so on. It is common for learning and teaching strategies to attempt to create some coherence between previously dispersed committee agendas, to combine committees with briefs concerned with the development of learning and teaching, and to redraft terms of reference accordingly. Sometimes a new committee is set up to oversee the development and implementation of the learning and teaching strategy, and existing committees become working groups or sub-committees with clear areas of responsibility for action within an overall structure, instead of operating in isolation. As implementing strategies involves goals, targets and action plans, rather than debate and policy only, committees may change in nature and become more task-oriented, monitoring action plans that are one component of an overall strategy.

    Senior management responsibilities

  5. Usually a pro vice-chancellor (PVC) or other senior manager has a portfolio of responsibility that includes the development of learning and teaching. These responsibilities may be split between different managers: for example separating quality assurance from learning support services or quality enhancement. Responsibilities may also be associated with particular policies or committees which themselves need to be recast or brought together to support a coherent strategy. It is not uncommon for institutions to reallocate pro vice-chancellors’ portfolios of responsibilities or create a new PVC post and associated committee structure in order to get the job done (see Case study 11).

    Academic departments

  6. Academic departments usually have responsibility for the quality of the learning and teaching of their students and staff, and for the development both of the quality of teaching and of their staff. In many institutions, departments have a great deal of autonomy in how they fulfil these responsibilities, and may ignore central policy. The development of strategy and policy is often undertaken in central committees; departments may not be involved in these discussions and may neither understand nor believe in what is decided centrally. Learning and teaching strategies often involve departments or faculties in setting up their own teaching committee to implement institutional strategy in a locally relevant way (see Case study 10). However, if the strategy has no departmental support even this is unlikely to succeed. Engaging departments in contributing to the development of the strategy is as important as engaging them in its implementation (see Case study 13).

  7. Resources to support developments in learning and teaching are often allocated to central service units or through centrally managed funds. Departmental initiatives may be backed by central funds and technical support. For example, a task force at one institution is made up of a team of staff: two lecturers half-time from each department. The task force is responsible for bringing about change within departments and sharing best practice across departments (see Case study 12). Previously, departmental efforts had been relatively separate from central policy and top-sliced initiatives.

    Quality assurance

  8. Quality assurance mechanisms and procedures of some kind are already in place in every institution to assure the quality of teaching. Most such mechanisms, however, are largely backward-looking, and concerned with the quality of what has already taken place rather than with how to bring about change in a particular direction. Quality assurance systems may also be problem-oriented rather than goal-oriented, seeking to identify and eliminate causes of poor quality rather than building in new qualities. The quality assurance literature suggests that systems should be more clearly oriented to anticipate future needs (Warren Piper, 1993). It is possible to develop quality assurance systems so that they monitor the extent of implementation of targets set by a learning and teaching strategy, an approach adopted by several HEIs.

    Operational planning

  9. Operational planning at departmental or faculty level usually involves plans for student numbers and curricular development. It sometimes also involves plans for developments in teaching and learning, and the associated staff development or investment required to achieve these plans. At some institutions, departments’ annual operational plans have to address institution-wide priorities (such as cost-effective assessment and uses of C&IT). These plans are discussed with the educational development unit, which allocates the consultant time and training support necessary to help departments to implement their plans. Centrally provided financial support may also be available to help departments to address institution-wide priorities. This strategic alignment of departmental plans with institutional plans, and the strategic targeting of central support for change, replaces a previously more ad hoc arrangement for providing educational development support and resources to whoever asks, for whatever purpose. In this sense, learning and teaching strategies extend the use of existing operational planning.

    Change mechanisms

  10. Most institutions already employ a range of methods for bringing about change, though these are not always recognised as such or included in learning and teaching strategies. For example HEIs may have an educational development unit, a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education for new teachers, mentoring for new teaching assistants, annual appraisal of teaching (including peer observation), student feedback systems, a fund to support innovations in teaching, or expert support for those using C&IT. These change mechanisms may, however, not be co-ordinated or managed by a single group, and responsibility may be shared across a range of committees without co-ordination. The cumulative effect of all this investment and effort may be less than the sum of its parts. Some learning and teaching strategies focus on bringing such change mechanisms together and orienting them to the same institutional goals. For example, if one of the main goals of the learning and teaching strategy involves exploitation of C&IT, then initial training could emphasise developing new teachers’ enthusiasm and competence in this area; funding for innovation could be targeted on C&IT applications; student feedback systems could be modified to find out more about students’ use of C&IT in their learning; and staff appraisal could be used to review the progress teachers have made in implementing C&IT over the past year. In this sense, being strategic can involve more integrated and more clearly focused use of existing efforts to support change.

  11. The funding associated with the HEFCE learning and teaching strategy initiative is to support the change mechanisms that institutions use to implement their strategy.

What do existing learning and teaching strategies include?

  1. Current documentation associated with learning and teaching strategies from institutions in England is extremely varied. Much of it consists of policies, mission statements and plans which have not yet been brought together. Where documents have been written as a coherent strategy they contain many different components, emphasising some aspects of strategic planning and leaving out others. All learning and teaching strategies currently in use in England contain some of the following 12 components, in varying combinations. Boundaries between these components are not always clear cut and the language used to describe the components varies greatly. The case studies in this guide illustrate several of the components.

    Context

  2. Documentation often starts with an ‘environmental scan’ (see Annex 5) – an analysis of the problems the institution faces, and the context it finds itself in, which are producing the pressures for change. This contextual analysis can be set in the present, in order to focus on catching up with changes the institution has not yet responded to, or can anticipate a future in order to set long-term goals for change. Some of these analyses could be used as a generic analysis of the state of UK higher education in the late 1990s while some refer to details of specific institutions’ current preoccupations.

Case study 1 A review of the context prior to developing a strategy

This brief extract from an internal paper illustrates a research institute reviewing its context as a precursor to deciding what kind of learning and teaching strategy would be appropriate.

The institutional context

[…..]

In general, courses and programmes in [….] have been subject to no formal external requirement or scrutiny. Consequently, approaches to teaching [….] result from a combination of traditions in different areas of inquiry, individual preferences and the influences of the student market.

There has been little institutional debate of our approaches to learning and teaching (although recent Academic Board Forums have begun to address the matter) and little opportunity to develop any institute-wide strategy. This is particularly significant given that we are operating modular systems both at Advanced Diploma and Master's levels and student movement across the Institute is increasing. It is becoming apparent to students that there is some unevenness in the tacit attitudes that they experience towards them in different academic areas and the support that they receive. From the student perspective, we do not always appear to be an 'academic community'.

Process of creation

  1. How the strategy is produced and communicated is usually important to its successful implementation. It is not uncommon for staff to be largely unaware of their institution’s mission or policies, and this fate can befall learning and teaching strategies as well. Some documentation includes a brief account of how, and why, the strategy has been developed and how ‘ownership’ has been achieved. This account can be reassuring to those who were not involved in its creation and helps to provide some legitimacy to its contents. It is not clear, from much current documentation, how most learning and teaching strategies have been produced. This may reduce the likelihood of their commanding the support of the majority of staff within the institution, whose views have not been sought or acknowledged. Negotiating learning and teaching strategies and building consensus is considered in more detail in paragraphs 85 and 86.

    Goals

  2. Learning and teaching strategies often state where the institution is trying to get to in terms of learning and teaching, and a rationale for this goal, in the form of a mission or vision, sometimes emphasising values. This may be linked to the institutional mission or drafted as a more specific extension to it. Some goals are framed in terms of tactics: the actual teaching and assessment methods that teachers might be expected to use. But this can alienate staff who expect to be able to use professional judgement within their disciplines to interpret the implications of institutional goals for appropriate methods in local contexts. This may mean, for example, stating the goal as ‘to make educational provision flexible and responsive to the varied needs of its students’ rather than ‘to deliver a significant proportion of all modules by open learning’. There has been staff opposition or disengagement in some institutions where goals have been too narrowly specified. Experience in Australia (see Annex 5) suggests that a small number of broad but unambiguous and widely understood goals is most effective.

Case study 2 Developing a strategy from an institutional vision

This case study illustrates the vision underlying a learning and teaching strategy. Specific targets could be derived from the broad goals outlined in this extract.

1. Vision

3.1 The learning environment. The University is committed to providing a welcoming learning environment which is inclusive, accessible and celebrates diversity for all its students and staff.

3.2 Focus on learning and the learner. The University’s primary goal is the promotion of learning and creation of new knowledge and understandings for and through its students and staff. To this end the strategy places the emphasis on achieving a significantly more learner-focused approach to the delivery of its programmes and increased support for lifelong learners.

3.3 Valuing diversity. The University will build on its strengths as a centre of learning for local, national and international students and values its multicultural and international character.

3.4 Flexibility. The University will achieve greater flexibility in access to learning through a variety of means, including greater use of resource-based learning employing new educational technologies. It will also increase flexibility by making programmes of learning available in a variety of modes, by encouraging credit accumulation, and by providing awards at a variety of stopping-off points.

3.5 Capable lifelong learners. The University will assist students to develop as capable, critical learners who are adaptable, autonomous and able to work with others in teams whatever their age, gender, race, religion, or nationality. All students will be provided with the opportunity to acquire key skills and to review and record their academic and personal development. Students will be assisted to overcome social and educational disadvantage and achieve success in their chosen careers.

3.6 Fair assessment for awards of national standing. The University will assure the national standing of its awards by fair, valid and reliable methods of assessment appropriate to the level of study being undertaken.

3.7 Support and recognition for excellence in teaching. Greater recognition, reward and support will be available to teaching and learning-support staff. In particular staff will be supported and rewarded for engagement in innovation, course development and achievement of excellence in teaching.

Culture

  1. Substantial and radical change in learning and teaching is likely to involve a change in institutional culture. Documentation may provide an argument or statement about what kind of culture an institution wants and what mechanisms might help to achieve it. The shift from ‘teacher-centred’ to ‘learner-centred’ provision (see Barr and Tagg, 1995) involves a profound transformation of attitudes and roles which cannot be achieved through a bit of staff development, some project funding, or a new policy. The development of a ‘learning community’, which is at the heart of the learning and teaching strategy of one institution, will inevitably take some years to build and even to understand what it means as the social and organisational implications become apparent. Of course, not every institution wants a new culture and not all educational innovation requires a new culture. But behind what may at first appear quick technical solutions to problems may lie challenging cultural shifts. For example, the increased use of the Internet may change the role of the teacher as a source of information or expertise, challenge the role of texts and the library in learning, and involve the blurring of conventional discipline boundaries. Some learning and teaching strategies address such cultural issues explicitly. In institutions such as church-based colleges the institutional mission, values and culture are often strongly linked and at the centre of the strategy, and may be considered more important than any specific plans or teaching methods.

    Targets

  2. Comprehensive learning and teaching strategies operationalise goals in ways that can be measured or monitored, ideally with schedules or milestones. Without operationalising goals, strategies may provide little in the way of clear incentives and may not communicate to staff what the institution is trying to achieve. While a goal might be ‘to meet the needs of our more varied students’, a target might be ‘to implement new student support mechanisms, such as diagnostic testing and targeted remedial provision, in all degree programmes, so as to increase retention in the first-year to 85 per cent by 2002 and 90 per cent by 2004’. While a goal might be ‘to develop students as lifelong learners’, this could be operationalised as: ‘Our students will seek more education and training opportunities, both formal and informal, in the first five years after graduating, and will make career transitions with greater ease’. Not all such targets are easy to specify, quantify or measure, but attempting to set them helps to clarify what the goals actually mean and why they are worthwhile. It also makes the implications for teaching, learning and assessment methods much clearer. Having targets and milestones makes monitoring possible.

    Curriculum

  3. Learning and teaching strategies often specify the changes it is envisaged that institutions will need to make in their pattern of course provision. Some institutions state only what new courses they intend to develop and offer. That is a curriculum strategy, not a learning and teaching strategy. Curricular implications of a learning and teaching strategy might include:

    Learning, teaching and assessment practices

  4. Documentation sometimes specifies the teaching, learning and assessment methods it is envisaged lecturers and courses will need to adopt or emphasise. Some existing learning and teaching strategies have focused on specific tactics, such as use of the Internet or video-taped lectures. It is particularly common to emphasise the use of C&IT without reference to the ways in which it will help the institution to achieve its strategic goals. This may come about where there has not been an adequate analysis of the institutional context, so that it is not clear what problem the proposed method is intended to solve. It may also come about where there is limited understanding of the use of methods – for example, assuming that the use of C&IT will automatically reduce costs or meet the needs of varied students more equitably, when the reverse might be the case. While it may be unwise to be prescriptive about details of methods, especially without justification, it is often helpful to give examples of the kinds of methods implied by the strategy so that teachers and others can understand better what they are signing up for. A strategy emphasising responsiveness to varied student needs implies a reduction in methods that are one-paced and unresponsive to level, such as large group lectures, and an increase in self-paced methods, independent learning and teaching targeted on carefully identified sub-groups of students. Teachers will quickly make assumptions about the implications of strategies for their everyday work, and it is sensible to guide these assumptions or rule out unpalatable alternatives. The important points here are not to confuse strategy with tactics, and not to over-specify tactics so that departments and teachers have little scope for manoeuvre to meet local demands.

    Quality assurance

  5. Learning and teaching strategies often specify mechanisms for reviewing courses to check that strategic goals are being pursued and, in some instances, for monitoring implementation of the learning and teaching strategy as a whole. Institutions commonly build on existing quality assurance mechanisms to implement and monitor their learning and teaching strategy. This may involve new requirements for course approval (such as the form of specification of learning outcomes) or course review (such as evaluating the success with which non-traditional students have been supported and have progressed). Annual departmental reviews or operational planning may also be reoriented to help to implement the learning and teaching strategy, for example by identifying staff development needs to implement new methods, or considering the budget implications of new patterns of delivery. It is usually considered unwise to develop additional and parallel demands for reporting or monitoring. However, existing quality assurance mechanisms are widely believed to encourage compliance rather than creativity, and yet have not always been successful in ensuring the implementation of existing policy. As monitoring and evaluation are crucial to the longer term implementation of learning and teaching strategies, existing quality assurance mechanisms may need to be reviewed and strengthened. Giving these mechanisms a clear focus on implementing a widely understood strategy can lead to more commitment from those involved than a general concern for weakly defined notions of ‘quality’. Committees responsible for the improvement of teaching have often not linked well with committees responsible for quality assurance. Thinking through how quality enhancement and quality assurance work together is a key challenge for learning and teaching strategies.

Case study 3 Aligning internal quality assurance and enhancement with external requirements

The extract in this case study of a small college illustrates a strategic realignment with external quality assurance requirements, affecting course planning, documentation and review, staff appraisal, staff development and teaching observation.

The review of course/programme teaching and learning methods and strategies will take place through:

4.4 Preparation for [….] Subject Review (1998-2000)

[….]

4.4.4.1. All annual monitoring reports now reflect the six key aspects of provision to be reviewed, and the QAA review criteria; additionally the institute’s annual monitoring processes and procedures are being reviewed from a QAA perspective.

4.4.1.2. Guidelines for the institute’s review and validation procedures will be revised in order to reflect QAA review criteria, and all course/programme teams will apply these criteria in the preparation of course/programme design, content, organisation and delivery.

4.4.1.3. The institute’s staff appraisal scheme has been reviewed resulting in a single scheme for all staff; thus enabling the comprehensive collation and consideration of teaching & learning staff development and research priorities.

4.4.1.4. It is the intention of the institute that teaching observation will have a public outcome; good teaching practice when observed will be noted and disseminated. Teaching observation is reviewed on a yearly and school basis. These reviews take place in May of each year of the plan. The review is undertaken by the Head of School, the Head of Quality Assurance, and a member of the teaching staff from another school. (The latter is nominated by the Board of Studies where teaching observation is being reviewed.)

4.4.1.5. Subsequent to initial ‘TQA’ briefing sessions within 1997/98 a number of specifically focused workshops will take place (spring and summer 1998) to further prepare all staff for what is now known as QAA subject review. These workshops will be informed by current policy and procedures. The institute is fortunate in having [several] teaching staff, who have been appointed by the QAA as Subject Reviewers, who will contribute to these. It is further intended that the above workshops culminate in an externally-led workshop and mock quality reviews in the 1998/99 academic year.

Quality enhancement and infrastructure changes

  1. Learning and teaching strategies need to go beyond setting goals or formulating policies, to consider what steps need to be taken to make it likely that these goals will be achieved. Some learning and teaching strategies recognise that institutions have not always been effective or consistent in implementing policy and that the culture and reward mechanisms have not always succeeded in capturing teachers’ time and attention to bring about change. As a consequence, strategies propose and allocate funds to additional change mechanisms of various kinds. It is this component of learning and teaching strategies that the HEFCE provides funding for; a range of options is considered in more detail in paragraphs 59-72. An important change mechanism is the recasting of the reward structure (see paragraphs 77-84). It is also in this aspect of learning and teaching strategies that documentation is most likely to address infrastructure blocks (see paragraphs 87-95).

    Implementation

  2. Strategic planning involves the management of change, not just setting change in motion. Some learning and teaching strategies go to some lengths to spell out which individuals, working groups or committees are responsible for what actions, who they report to, to what schedule, and so forth.

Case study 4 Planning the implementation of a learning and teaching strategy



This extract from a learning and teaching strategy illustrates an action plan showing how policy and educational principles are linked to action, current progress, a statement of who is responsible and deadlines.

Policy: educational principles

Proposed action

Current status

Responsibility

By when?

4.2.1 Developing graduate attributes

Graduateness

Academic competence

Intellectual capability

Refine programme specifications.

Modules and programmes should reflect these principles through learning objectives, assessment and content.

Progression should be clear.

Partly in place through modular scheme review (1997-98).

Policy and advice to be sent out to influence action priorities in module/ subject annual reports.

[names and specific responsibilities listed]

Advice by July 1998.

1998 reports to initiate process.

Broad and balanced programmes including key skills and personal and social skills

Refine programme specifications. Modules and programmes should include a range of skills (the final definitions to depend on QAA guidelines).

Partially included in modular scheme review (1997-98).

More work to be done as subjects reviewed internally in preparation for QAA assessment.

Pilot: September 1998.

Work-related experience

APEL initiatives (entrance requirements).

APEL initiatives (module accreditation).

Work experience module.

Initiatives and pilot underway.

Draft proposals.

Pilot: September 1998.

4.2.2 Managing learning

Level of student support for learning skills to be increased in Foundation year.

Staffing resources to be deployed appropriately.

Start September 1998.

4.2.4 Effective support for staff and students

Effective support (students)

First-year academic support programme for students.

IT database of modules to be specified.

Student handbooks to be reviewed and revised. Review to include:

Quality of production

Content – accuracy

Coverage – essential and additional

Student study skill support.

Partly in place.

Needs supporting structure (academic studies tutors) and resources.

Needs agreed,

framework and support for quality production,

i.e. Art and design support

i.e. Technology support (for intranet) – funding needed.

Pilot or implement 1998-99.

Develop from September 1998 for trial use in Sep 1999.

September 1998.

Rolling programme of handbook reviews from 1998-99.

Effective support (staff)

Academic studies tutors supported and briefed.

Staff accreditation programme to be offered to all new appointments 1998.

Responsibilities to be clarified and staffing resources allocated.

Staff accreditation programme: tutors and resources.

September 1998.

September 1998.

Monitoring

  1. Some learning and teaching strategies include the setting up of mechanisms to check that the strategy has been implemented. Documentation from some institutions shows enthusiastic learning and teaching strategy committees having set ambitious targets and proposed widespread action. It is sometimes much harder to see from the documentation if anything has actually happened on the ground, or indeed how the committee would know if anything had happened. For example, if it has been agreed that all courses should develop students’ transferable skills, how could progress be monitored? First, this agreement needs to have been operationalised in an unambiguous way and turned into targets. Second, there needs to be a way of collecting information, perhaps through routine course monitoring, about whether these targets have been met. Third, a specified group or individual has to have responsibility for collating this information in a manageable way and reporting on progress. Fourth, this progress report has to be either to a body with the authority to intervene if there has been inadequate progress, or to the unit responsible for the action so that it can take the initiative in responding appropriately. Sometimes existing quality assurance mechanisms have been modified to provide more of a monitoring function. It is clear from existing documentation that plans for monitoring the implementation of learning and teaching strategies are usually less well developed than other components.

    Evaluation

  2. Institutions need to know not just whether planned actions have been taken, but whether the desired outcomes have been achieved – they need to know if implementation of the strategy has been effective. It is possible for all the actions specified in a learning and teaching strategy to have been carried out, and for learning to be no more effective than before, students no more skilful or employable, and teaching no more cost-effective. Whether the proposed actions will have the desired effects is a matter for evaluation, which is much more difficult than monitoring. Some institutions with radical and comprehensive learning and teaching strategies, such as Alverno College in the USA, have invested heavily in institutional research to find out if their innovations have resulted in long-term benefits to students (Mentkowski and Loaker, 1985). In Australia, all institutions use the ‘course experience questionnaire’ as one component in evaluating the effectiveness of changes (see Annex 2), as it is administered to all graduates every year. In England, institutions may need to set up their own evaluation plans.

    Coherent and comprehensive strategies

  3. The 12 components outlined above can work together to create a coherent strategy; with a number of these elements missing, the strategy and its implementation might be weaker. The following hypothetical example, based on an actual case, illustrates how these 12 components might fit together to create a complete learning and teaching strategy. In practice such a strategy would be more complex and multi-faceted, but the conciseness of this illustration helps to demonstrate the potential coherence of a strategy and the role of each component in relation to the others. There is no intention to be prescriptive about what the components should be, but rather to illustrate what a coherent strategy might look like, in brief, rather than just illustrating the separate components, as in the case studies.

Case study 5 A hypothetical learning and teaching strategy, illustrating its coherence

Context

Our students are increasingly locally based and this means increasingly varied educational backgrounds. Retention rates are declining.

Process of creation

An analysis of the context and main goals, undertaken by the Learning and Teaching Committee, as discussed at departmental level and on the Internet before a second round of consultation about appropriate teaching methods and change mechanisms, which were then costed by the Finance Committee and agreed by Senate.

Goals

  1. Improve access for specified student groups

  2. Improve retention through teaching, learning and assessment suited to their needs.

Culture

We need to create a learning culture focused on meeting student needs, and a departmental commitment to a range of tactics focused on the two goals.

Targets

  1. 50% of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds by 2002, 60% by 2006

  2. 82% retention of first-year students by 2002, 86% by 2004, 90% by 2006.

Curriculum

  1. Access courses: 6 new courses for 600 students by 2001-02, 10 for 1,000 by 2002-03

  2. Semester 1 learning skills module available to every student by 2000-01

Learning, teaching and assessment practices

  1. Recasting of personal tutor system into a first-year learning skills role: pilot with four departments 1999-2000, full implementation 2000-01

  2. Early diagnosis of students’ learning needs (both background knowledge and learning skills) in every degree programme by 2001

  3. Creation of open-access short courses to meet these needs: ongoing.

Quality assurance

Annual Programme Review used to monitor introduction of access courses, learning skills modules and short courses.

Quality enhancement and infrastructure changes

  1. Funding for access projects through Teaching Development Fund

  2. New teaching role of ‘first-year tutor’ in each department

  3. Support roles accounted for generously in lecturers’ teaching allocations

  4. ‘Access Forum’ created to share best practice across departments.

Implementation

  1. Learning and Teaching Committee responsible for oversight of strategy

  2. Departments responsible for changes within programmes

  3. Operational plans for both strategy and departments, with schedules.

Monitoring

  1. Registry to monitor educational background of new students and retention

  2. Programme Approval Committee to monitor introduction of learning skills modules and short courses

  3. Learning and Teaching Committee to monitor funded access projects.

Evaluation

  1. Annual survey of students’ reasons for (a) not taking up places (b) dropping out, to be undertaken by the Registry

  2. Departments to evaluate changes in student skills and attitudes within first-year programmes as part of routine course evaluation

  3. Learning and Teaching Committee to undertake overall review of operation of strategy, and propose modifications, for consultation, every two years, starting 2001.

  1. Although a comprehensive learning and teaching strategy might contain all 12 components, in practice only one institution’s strategy was found to do so. A small number of learning and teaching strategies were found to contain most components and use language carefully to distinguish these components and their roles. For example, one strategy contains the following section headings:

    It is important to emphasise that institutions present elements of their strategy and its associated documentation in different ways, and that we have insufficient experience to be able to recommend any particular format over any other. It is also important to emphasise the way comprehensive learning and teaching strategies demonstrate ‘joined-up thinking’ and present a holistic picture that encompasses all the relevant components, even if they are presented in distinctive ways.

Case study 6 Linking objectives to actions

This case study illustrates a succinct way of stating the overall objectives and components of a learning and teaching strategy, setting the proposed learning innovations in a context. In further sections (not included in this extract) each component is then considered in more detail with associated targets and costings, identifying who is responsible for delivery and monitoring.

Summary

The principal aim of the learning strategy is to raise the standards of teaching, learning and assessment across the university. It seeks to achieve this by the development of a learning ethos based on research excellence in teaching and learning methods and by the critical appraisal of the process and outcomes of students’ learning experience.

There are two basic objectives:

The strategy identifies four inter-related dimensions to the enhancement of learning:

Learning innovation – new methods and approaches to teaching, learning and assessment

Learning support – creating the ‘learning environment’

Staff development – raising professional standards in teaching, learning and assessment

Quality assurance – demonstrating quality maintenance and enhancement

The major recommendations include:

Learning innovation

Learning support

Staff development

Quality assurance

Change mechanisms

  1. Learning and teaching strategies which consist of a well-argued analysis of context and a statement of sensible goals may be of little help unless robust mechanisms are in place to achieve these goals. Teaching has proved extraordinarily resistant to change over a long period of time and an effective strategy is likely to need more than one change mechanism. The mechanisms that institutions currently use to help implement their learning and teaching strategies, and which are considered briefly here, are:

    Institutions also use reward mechanisms, which are discussed in detail in paragraphs 77-84.

    Staff development and training

  2. Training of new higher education teachers is now almost universal in the UK and is often associated with accreditation. Some institutions use this investment in educational development staff, and in the time of new teachers, to orient teachers towards the institutional mission or learning and teaching strategy. Compared with the USA, training in the UK is much more likely to be concerned with teachers’ ability to be responsive to contexts, to reflect, to be student-centred and to innovate, rather than merely to reproduce the teaching required in the past, and is also likely to involve 'action research' rather than fine honing of traditional classroom skills. Institutions can make use of this strength in initial training to orient new teachers’ innovations in particular directions.

  3. Most institutions are increasing their use of part-time teachers, either graduate teaching assistants or contract staff, to cut costs and increase flexibility in teaching. This is a strategy whether or not it is explicit. However, it is clear from TQA reports that this strategy is not always backed by adequate briefing, training or support for part-time staff. Learning and teaching strategies may include plans to:

    The establishment of an associate membership level of accreditation by the ILT has provided an opportunity to focus support for part-time teachers in some institutions. For example one university is offering two routes to this first level of accreditation for all its part-time lecturers, involving either a distance-learning programme or accreditation of prior experiential learning (APEL). Another university programme for new teachers is run in two stages and includes all graduate teaching assistants in the first stage.

  4. Experienced staff also have knowledge and techniques to acquire if they are to implement new forms of learning and teaching. However, they are likely to need very different kinds of staff development. In particular they are likely to want to learn only what they need in order to get particular teaching jobs done, and may be able to acquire this learning on the job. As a consequence, much effective CPD is associated with projects in the form of ‘action learning’. This may require ‘consultancy’ support or the creation of small working teams. On the other hand, extensive programmes of training workshops may be less successful in engaging staff, as such workshops are difficult to target and schedule appropriately to meet the very specific needs and interests of experienced staff. A number of learning and teaching strategies have paid attention to the form that staff development should take for experienced staff. Case study 7 describes a ‘teaching fellows’ scheme which gives experienced staff the time and status to engage with strategically selected innovations in teaching, backed up by a Masters-level course.

Case study 7 Reporting on progress in a component of a strategy concerned with staff development

This case study extract summarises progress and plans in relation to one objective of the learning and teaching strategy at a university. The focus of this objective is making staff time available to undertake targeted projects and giving the key people involved the special title of ‘teaching fellow’.

Target 7.2 (revised May 1996)

Enhancement of current practice and research into learning methods

Summary of progress 1995-96

Further developments

1996-97

Evaluation project on the first 4 rounds of Teaching Fellowships

Full complement of TLCs to be appointed

Staff development activity for TLCs

Additional support for the delivery of Diploma and Masters modules

1997-98
1998-99
Resource requirements (costs) 96/97 97/98 98/99
10 fellowships and 5 fellowship projects p.a. @ 5,000 per fellowship 75,000 75,000 75,000
Teaching Fellowship Evaluation Project 5,000 -- --
TLC costs for remission from other duties @ 2,500 per TLC p.a. 40,000 40,000 40,000
Support for delivery of Diploma & Masters modules, 200 hrs at p/t rates 5,000 5,000 5,000
  1. Some institutions have oriented their learning and teaching strategy towards the development of more resource-based learning. One implication of such a strategy is that a range of support staff in learning resource centres, student services and computer centres often become more central to teaching and more important to students. Staff development orienting these staff to the purposes of the learning and teaching strategy may be vital to the success of the strategy.

    Personnel processes

  2. Personnel decisions can be used strategically to improve teaching. The most important are:

    Appointment procedures

  3. Not all institutions take steps to ensure that they appoint excellent teachers, or at least committed teachers. 'Ivy League' universities in the USA have changed selection procedures to include devices such as the ‘pedagogical colloquium’ to ensure that those primarily appointed as researchers are also committed to teaching and have some potential to lead teaching developments in the future. Typically, applicants are required to give a seminar explaining how they would teach and assess a particular course relevant to their specialism, and how they would develop this course in coming years. Attitudes towards innovation, students and the use of IT can all be explored at interview. CVs can be required to provide more information about teaching experience and competence.

    Probation regulations

  4. Probation can be used to ensure a basic level of competence in new teachers or to orient them to the learning and teaching strategy. A number of institutions have already linked probation or tenure decisions to successful completion of a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education or to Staff and Educational Development Association accreditation. In Norway, for example, it is not possible to become an assistant professor at any university without successfully completing initial training as a teacher.

    Appraisal

  5. All institutions have an appraisal scheme for teaching staff, though appraisal is implemented to varying extents and with varied focuses of attention. In many contexts it would be possible to reinvigorate appraisal and give it a clearer purpose. This could involve peer observation of teaching each year, and reporting in the appraisal interview the outcomes of observation and attempts to develop teaching. A number of institutions have developed peer observation in this way and linked it to their learning and teaching strategy. Student feedback systems may also be used, not just as quality assurance devices, but to prompt targeted change. Student feedback systems can be oriented to focus on issues central to the learning and teaching strategy, such as basic skills. Student feedback and how it is acted upon can be discussed in appraisal. Appraisal can also be used to review an individual’s contribution to implementing the institution’s learning and teaching strategy. This may be especially effective where departments have responsibility for local initiatives to implement an institution-wide strategy. Appraisal of teaching is likely to have more impact when based on data, such as that provided by student feedback and peer observation, and pulled together in a teaching profile which provides a thoughtful review prior to the appraisal meeting.

    Promotion and financial reward

  6. These are considered in paragraphs 77-84.

Case study 8 Staffing issues as part of learning and teaching strategies

This extract illustrates one objective of a university's learning and teaching strategy that is concerned with staffing issues.

Objective Three: that the teaching staff are of the highest calibre and are given relevant support and development as well as receiving appropriate rewards for teaching excellence.

The university wishes to ensure the appointment, retention and development of the highest calibre staff:

Good teaching is encouraged, identified, disseminated and rewarded:

  1. new staff will be required to become accredited teachers

  2. existing staff will be encouraged to seek accreditation through the proposed Institute for Learning and Teaching

  3. by the financial reward of good teaching either through performance-related payments or through promotion

  4. providing appropriate performance and appraisal mechanisms

  5. peer review of teaching.

Current developments include:

Case study 9 Using ‘teaching development groups’ as part of an institutional strategy

A college of higher education has had a ‘learning, teaching and assessment policy’ since 1994. The college has recently established a ‘teaching development group scheme’ to help implement this policy. All academic staff, including many part-time teachers, belong to such a group. They observe the teaching of other members of the group, and are observed by them, and use the group to discuss how the college strategy can be implemented in everyday teaching. The aims, objectives and operation of the scheme are summarised in a leaflet, brief extracts of which are reproduced here.

1. Aim of the scheme

The teaching development group scheme aims to support the college mission which is to provide a high-quality learning environment which is innovative, challenging and enterprising. The scheme contributes to the college policy on learning, teaching and assessment by ‘enhancing the ways in which staff are supported and developed’ . … Whilst the framework of the scheme will be applied consistently across the college, it will be developed by faculties to address their specific circumstances and strategic plans related to teaching, learning and assessment.

2. Objectives of the scheme

A process for meeting, observing and reporting is specified and supported by documentation. The Associate Dean Academic is responsible for orienting teaching development groups to faculty agendas and for reporting up through the system issues raised by the groups. Each group has a co-ordinator who arranges the schedule of observations and meetings and writes a brief annual report which contributes to monitoring the implementation of the strategy. Individual teachers use the outcomes of observation in their appraisal, called ‘staff development review’.

Funding for innovation

  1. Just as the HEFCE provides substantial funding for educational development projects on a national scale, through the joint FDTL/TLTP programme, many institutions provide equivalent funding internally to support innovation and change in teaching. Some of these schemes have been operating for nearly 20 years while others have been established recently to support specific components of learning and teaching strategies. Some schemes have been remodelled so that projects now address departmental or institutional priorities, rather than being based only on individual interests. Projects may be supported centrally by educational developers, IT technicians or research assistants and may work collaboratively across departments where they are addressing similar issues, such as assessing transferable skills.

    Support for research into learning and teaching

  2. In a scholarly culture the pragmatism of improving teaching has not always engaged academics. Harvard University has adopted an approach to improving teaching that revolves around helping staff to identify research questions about teaching that intrigue them, and then providing support as teachers pursue these questions. Research has evolved into action research and well-founded change in teaching and assessment. One university has a Learning and Teaching Research Institute which has supported over 80 teachers in researching their practice; many of them were entered into the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise on the basis of published outcomes of this research-led change strategy.

    Educational development units and learning technology units

  3. Many institutions have some kind of unit or centre that provides support for change in learning and teaching. Reviews of change initiatives have on several occasions identified the role of expert educational development staff as crucial to success. A number of institutions have established such units or developed them from embryo units, as part of their learning and teaching strategy.

  4. Within a strategic framework units can:

    Learning resource facilities

  5. Institutions that are using learning and teaching strategies to move towards more student- centred and learning-centred approaches have often reviewed the role of conventional libraries and other aspects of the provision of learning resources, such as facilities for producing learning materials. An increasing number of institutions have invested in learning resource centres. These contain not only conventional library stocks and space for private study, but also:

  6. Many learning and teaching strategies also include plans to ease the production of learning resources. These may include:

    These facilities may appear to be simply resources. But their availability is in itself a lever for change. Once it becomes easy for lecturers to produce learning materials and to support group-based learning, for example, they are much more likely to adopt this kind of option. Simply making change easier can be a very effective strategy.

Organisational change

  1. Several early attempts at bringing about large-scale change through a learning and teaching strategy concentrated on learning resource centres and other facilities at the expense of considering the organisational context within which change was to take place. In particular some of these strategies attended to central resources and management without paying heed to those who would actually implement the strategy. Three levels of the organisation may need attention:

    It is common for the first draft of learning and teaching strategies to pay attention to the institutional level, but not the departmental or individual level.

  2. More developed learning and teaching strategies include features such as:

Case study 10 A devolved departmental learning and teaching strategy

At one university, each department or academic unit produces its own teaching and learning strategy within an overall university framework. For example a college of art which is one part of this university has its own ‘teaching and learning management plan’. This plan includes:

  1. The mission of the college of art within the framework of the university’s mission.

  2. Which three of the university’s four ‘areas of priority’ (flexible learning; internationalisation; course and subject evaluation; recognising and rewarding good teaching) it is planning to address, and why.

  3. For each of these three areas:

The following is an extract from the college of art’s plan, focusing on the outcomes of previous course evaluation.

Some evidence of student dissatisfaction with assessment practices in studio and theory subjects emerged from: the subject evaluation surveys completed at the end of 1997; the distribution of marks and grades in some subjects (which suggests the need for more discriminating assessment techniques); some of the student appeals against marks and grades. There is no question but that assessment practices must improve, that is, become more explicit and transparent.

Faculty objective

The first teaching and learning objective for the college of art is to improve assessment practices in teaching.

Staff development

Staff development to meet this objective will take the form of: seminar sessions and workshops on the subject of assessment; a scrutiny of subject outlines to ensure that good assessment instruments are being used.

Indicators of progress

The things that will indicate progress in this matter are: staff attendance at seminar sessions and workshops; improved subject outlines in 1998; improved subject evaluation surveys throughout 1998; a better distribution of grades in the final assessment round; fewer appeals against marks and grades in connection with assessment practices at the end of 1998.

Funding

The only funding required will be to run the seminars and workshops. This can be met from the college of art's existing teaching and learning budget.

Timeline

The staff development and scrutiny will be carried out over 1998.

Departments have responded differently in the style and content of their ‘teaching and learning management plans’. These departmental differences help to show how local autonomy can operate within an institutional plan.

Case study 11 A new management structure to implement a learning and teaching strategy

The following outline of organisational changes comes from a research-oriented university.

Management and committee structure

The Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching)

There should be a pro vice-chancellor with executive responsibility for the implementation of the university learning and teaching strategy. This will involve university-wide co-ordination of the key elements of the strategy, that is:

Committee structure

The University Learning and Teaching Committee (thus renamed) should be at the apex of a structure with clear lines of accountability. The membership of the Learning and Teaching Committee must be strengthened and its terms of reference revised to reflect the importance of this role.

Taking the taught degree programme as the basic element, the following academic management structure is proposed:

  1. Each programme should have a named programme co-ordinator responsible for:

  2. Each faculty must have a learning and teaching committee, reconstituted or established de novo as appropriate, responsible for the following core functions:

    The Faculty Learning and Teaching Committees will share core terms of reference relating to this task, but will also be concerned with other issues specific to their subject areas and approaches to teaching. They will be responsible to the Faculty Boards, which will in turn be responsible to the University Learning and Teaching Committee for the implementation of the learning and teaching strategy at faculty level.

  3. The University Learning and Teaching Committee will report to the Resources and Allocations Committee (or its successor) and thence to Senate. It will be chaired by the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching) and be responsible for:

    The membership of the Learning and Teaching Committee must be strengthened to include some of the budget centre managers, and its terms of reference revised to reflect the importance of its enhanced role. The involvement of budget centre managers is crucial to the implementation of the strategy throughout the university; however, the Task Group would wish the committee to continue to include within its membership other members of staff with acknowledged expertise and enthusiasm in the areas of learning and teaching.

Case study 12 The use of a department-based task force to bring about change

One university has established a ‘task force’ consisting of 26 half-time staff from departments, who are undertaking 20 projects to develop learning and teaching. The task force started as an initiative by the PVC to allocate time for teaching staff to innovate, so that the potential of IT could be exploited more fully. Projects have titles such as ‘Research methods in the electronic age’ and ‘Multi-media applications for the teaching, learning and assessment of modern languages’. The task force has evolved from this project format into a change management strategy. The university’s teaching and learning strategy has been developed alongside the task groups, and much has been learnt about how to foster and embed change and to spread good practice across the university. The task force:

This is a good example of significant investment in a change mechanism and flexibility in adapting the operation of a mechanism in the light of a changed context and institutional learning about change. The deliberate use of research to maximise this learning is unusual, but has proved very important.

Rewarding excellent teaching

  1. The central purpose of the individual strand of the HEFCE's Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund is to reward and recognise individual academics who have demonstrated excellence in learning and teaching. The Council is adopting a two-pronged approach:

    1. The Council will provide £1 million a year to the ILT to fund a National Teaching Fellowship Scheme to be launched in the year 2000. The Council will develop the arrangements for the scheme with the ILT. Further information will be available later in 1999 from the ILT.

    2. The Council will also expect institutions to use part of the funding available to them for implementing their learning and teaching strategies to strengthen their own reward and recognition schemes for teaching staff, giving them greater capacity to reward high-quality teaching.

  2. One of the most influential levers for change in teaching is reward mechanisms. In the USA, the ‘Roles and Rewards’ initiative managed by the American Association for Higher Education has had a far-reaching impact on attitudes and practices on many campuses. In the UK, the balance of reward between research excellence and teaching excellence has not changed greatly at many institutions despite attempts at reform (see HEQC, 1996); and more radical changes to existing reward systems may be necessary. The main options are:

    Changing promotion criteria

  3. Most institutions already have criteria stating that excellence in teaching will be considered alongside excellence in research and administration. However, it is clear from evidence and experience that in many institutions teaching excellence does not carry the same weight, though it is common for it to carry some weight and for evidently poor teaching to be weighed against excellence in research.

    Changing promotion procedures

  4. To promote excellent teachers, institutions may need to use one or more of the following tactics:

    Awards and recognition for excellence

  5. In the USA, it is common for there to be public recognition of outstanding achievement in teaching through annual awards, including awards ceremonies. This practice is spreading to the UK and there is growing experience of a range of practices (Warren and Plumb, 1999). Particular awards may be discipline-specific, sponsored by professional bodies, companies or the Students’ Union, and nominated by colleagues, students or alumni. Those recognised may be appointed to an ‘academy’ of outstanding teachers who are consulted on teaching policy issues. Award winners may be given financial support to spread their practice or undertake study visits to find out about teaching in other institutions.

    Merit pay

  6. Some institutions use versions of performance-related pay, or merit awards, to recognise outstanding teaching achievements. One university allows heads of academic centres to nominate individuals for either specified financial awards, or additional increments, for any personal achievements over the past year of particular value to the centre. There is clearly scope to use modest awards to orient teachers to the goals of learning and teaching strategies.

    New teaching-oriented senior posts

  7. An increasing number of institutions have established new kinds of posts to reward outstanding teachers and give them the status to lead further developments in teaching: readerships in teaching, teaching fellows, or principal lecturer promotions earmarked for teaching excellence. These posts may be awarded for large-scale curricular change or innovation across a degree programme rather than for personal teaching competence, and may involve the postholder leading future changes in teaching rather than simply being recognised for past achievement.

  8. Recognising and rewarding teaching is not easy to do in a culture that values research more highly (Gibbs, 1995b). Promotion for excellent teachers, on its own, is unlikely to change this culture. While not everyone can become a professor, there are nevertheless plenty of incentives to encourage lecturers to pay attention to undertaking research of quality, and most academics work within an environment that values research. Research is valued or judged frequently, through peer review of grant proposals, journal articles, conference papers and so on. Confidence in judgements about excellence, and the ascribing of value to an activity, depend crucially on frequent and rigorous peer judgement. Teaching generally lacks this culture of peer judgement, and a few isolated promotion decisions are unlikely to change this situation. Some institutions have developed peer observation schemes which greatly increase the volume and frequency of peer review, and support associated reward mechanisms (see Case study 9).

Case study 13 Linking reward for teaching excellence to a learning and teaching strategy

A Scottish university awards about 10 teaching fellowships a year. These are titles rather than positions or promotions and can be held by any category of staff. Applications involve a portfolio of evidence assessed against criteria which align with the university’s learning, teaching and assessment strategy. These criteria are primarily concerned with student-focused education and the development of lifelong learners.

Teaching fellows have an active role to play in implementing the learning, teaching and assessment strategy within their department and are consulted about institution-wide policy issues concerning learning and teaching. Reward takes the form of:

A separate promotion procedure requires excellence in two of teaching, research, and administration; a teaching fellowship is considered prima facie evidence of teaching excellence.

Fifty such fellowships would cost the institution about £25,000 a year.

Two other universities are developing teaching fellowship schemes based on this model.

How do institutions develop learning and teaching strategies?

  1. Institutions differ widely in the way they create their learning and teaching strategy. The process can include:

  2. The survey of current practice (see Annex 1) found that very few of the learning and teaching strategies in existence in January 1999 were the product of extensive or open consultation or had been through more than two stages of development and revision. Given the importance placed in the organisational development literature on building ownership and commitment (see Annex 3), this may undermine the implementation of many institutions’ strategies. In contrast, some institutions have spent well over a year on the process and have consulted literally hundreds of staff in a variety of ways through a series of planned stages, sometimes involving external consultants to provide neutrality or expertise in change processes.

Case study 14 An extended process of consultation to develop a strategy that staff understand and believe in

At the start of 1998, the university described in this case study appointed a new Vice-Chancellor and a new Head of Academic Development. They already had a number of the components that are commonly found in learning and teaching strategies:

Some departments already had their own strategies, for assessment for example. However, they did not have a coherent vision of the kind of learning and teaching that needed to take place to support the mission of the university, which is concerned with lifelong learning.

The development of a learning, teaching and assessment strategy concentrated on building understanding and consensus so as to create a culture which would be supportive of the desired changes. This process involved the following stages, over a period of 13 months.

  1. An open invitation was sent, addressed individually to every member of teaching and support staff, eliciting ideas about how to take the university's vision forward in terms of learning, teaching and assessment.

  2. A summary of 40 responses, including responses from deans, was prepared in a short paper.

  3. Five open meetings took place on different sites to prompt further discussion of this paper, attended by 60 staff. The role of senior management at these sessions was simply to listen.

  4. A draft learning, teaching and assessment strategy document was then written, and debated at a one-day conference attended by 150 staff.

  5. A revised document was discussed at faculty level and in support centres. Eight meetings were held. At this stage the key ideas were fleshed out, concerning what the university believed in and ‘key areas of focus’, without worrying about detailed implementation.

  6. A revised draft was discussed by the corporate management team.

  7. A revised draft was circulated to all staff for comment; 20 replies were received and six site meetings were held. By this stage staff were engaging in a good level of debate.

  8. A final draft was submitted to Academic Board, which approved the strategy without change, the consultation process having successfully addressed all the important issues at earlier stages.

The entire process was managed by the Head of Academic Development and the Head of the Educational Development Unit, working as a team. They attended all 21 consultation meetings, collated responses or comments and undertook all redrafting. The development of operational plans to implement the strategy is the responsibility of faculties. As the discussions developed, infrastructure changes which would be required (for example in the IT system) were listed and collated into an appendix for attention by several identified groups. An academic development fund of £0.5 million per year has been allocated to support the implementation of the strategy.

Infrastructure blocks

  1. It is common when planning change to draw up a ‘force field’ diagram to analyse the forces for change and the balancing forces obstructing change, which together create the status quo (see Fig 1). To bring about change, you can increase the pressures for change. But as there seem to be no shortages of pressures, it can be more effective to remove some of the blocks. Within an institution it is possible to identify features of the infrastructure, such as accounting systems, staffing and the use of space, which were designed to support the operations that the organisation is trying to move away from. Learning and teaching strategies are likely to have to address features of an institution’s infrastructure which were established to support conventional learning and teaching, but which are now blocking change. It is not always easy to identify these blocks as they are commonly taken for granted. A number of the most influential blocks are considered briefly here, particularly in relation to the most expensive and scarce resource: teachers’ time.

    Increased student numbers Rewards biased towards research

    External quality assessment Teaching methods constrained by space

    Pressure to use C&IT in teaching Productivity measured by class contact

    Pressure to improve employability No ‘design time’ in workload planning

    Forces producing pressure for change Forces obstructing change

    Fig 1 A ‘force field’ diagram: forces for change being balanced by infrastructure blocks

  2. Teachers’ workloads are usually assigned, and their productivity accounted for, in terms of class contact hours. These hours may be given equal weighting regardless of their cost-effectiveness. An hour in a small-group tutorial might be accounted for in the same way as an hour in a lecture to 50 students, while an hour developing a project or learning materials that could engage a hundred students for several hours out of class might not be accounted for at all. Class contact time is an input measure – a bit like measuring research productivity in terms of hours spent in the library or laboratory. Using this measure may not have mattered much when all courses were delivered in much the same way with the same resource consequences, but it can stifle innovation and make improvements in cost-effectiveness difficult to achieve. Teachers may be reluctant to adopt any change in their teaching which would result in a reduction in class contact, for fear that they would simply be allocated additional classes or courses in order to make up their hours to the contract maximum. In this context it is not in the interests of individual teachers to be cost-effective or to introduce more learner-centred methods. It also discourages assessment innovations that support learning, as marking time is not accounted for.

  3. A more appropriate output measure than class contact hours might be ‘student learning hours supported’. If an institution has a student-staff ratio of 20:1 and a student learning year is 900 hours (six 150-hour modules), then on average each full-time teacher is responsible for supporting 20 students x 900 hours = 18,000 student learning hours. There are already learning outcome measures in the form of examinations and student feedback, and checks on these in the form of external examiners and quality assurance systems. With this accountancy system, teachers will seek whichever educational solutions achieve acceptable learning outcomes at the lowest possible cost in terms of their own time. There are other accounting solutions to this infrastructure problem which institutions have already adopted, and which have different impacts on teacher behaviour, such as allocating ‘nominal hours’ to teaching duties, but not counting the hours actually used. Stephenson and Yorke (1998) provide an illustration of how the disposition of staff time might be reconfigured in order to be consistent with broader curricular aims.

  4. Teachers’ workload planning usually includes course delivery, but not course development. In fact, in most institutions course development is invisible and not accounted for at all. The time necessary to innovate in a large class, or to introduce IT, simply cannot be found by many individual teachers, given existing workload allocation systems and assumptions about duties. Almost all forms of resource-based learning involve a different balance of resources and staff time, between development and delivery, than does conventional teaching. In one university, workload planning for central academic staff is dominated by time allocated for ‘course production’. Institutions may need to review and change their approaches to workload planning to manage most large-scale innovation or curricular development.

  5. Student support activities, such as personal tutoring, have also tended to be missing from formal workload planning, and the demise of personal tutoring systems has been almost inevitable as a consequence. Remedial or study-skills activities taking place outside credit-bearing modules may also be missing from workload planning. Again, particular accounting systems may block the kind of educational change required.

  6. Space on campus has traditionally been allocated for teaching, but not for learning. As class sizes have increased, the main investment in space has often been in lecture theatres. When students’ class contact hours were high, the learning space available in the library was often adequate for out-of-class time. But when hours out of class represent three-quarters of all learning hours, and when student numbers double, students simply have nowhere to sit to study. Some campuses may not be able to provide places for studying for more than a small proportion of their students at any one time, and so learning takes place either off-campus or not at all. The kinds of learning methods being adopted to support students, such as group-based project work or peer tutoring, may have no suitable space allocated on site. The current dominant planning convention of scheduling teaching space either for every week of a semester, or not at all, prevents variation in patterns of learning, such as lectures for the first half of a semester and projects thereafter, or alternative weeks of lectures and resource-based learning. Space allocated for the maximum efficiency of traditional methods can block change and wreck otherwise sensible innovations.

  7. The institutional budget for some learning resources (such as classrooms or libraries) may be top-sliced, and so is ‘free’ to departments or lecturers, while other learning resources may incur a direct and additional cost to departments (for example, printing of learning materials). Similarly, while borrowing library books may be free to students, photocopying learning packages or printing off pages from the Internet or handouts from an Intranet, may not. Heads of department may feel obliged to support only those patterns of learning and teaching that do not incur departmental charges, even if they are more expensive to the institution overall. Resource-based learning may be cheaper to the institution but more expensive to departments, and so not adopted despite its advantages of flexibility to students. The opposite also takes place, with lecturers being encouraged within their departments to develop computer-based courses, despite high costs per student learning hour, only where computer laboratory installation, maintenance and support costs are picked up centrally, rather than by the department. Who pays, rather than overall cost-effectiveness, may determine decision-making about educational provision.

  8. Infrastructure blocks may also involve information systems – for example, limited access by students to the Internet, or lack of integration of administrative and teaching information systems so that tutors do not have access to assessment information to identify students at risk. The strategic alignment of information strategies and learning and teaching strategies may be crucial for progress in this area. In Case study 12 the task force has been effective in identifying IT blocks and has had a role in defining appropriate IT solutions.

  9. Comprehensive learning and teaching strategies may address such accounting, funding and resource allocation issues in a strategic way, by considering the wider resource picture within which local teaching decisions are made.

Underpinning principles and practices

Principles of teaching and learning

  1. Learning and teaching strategies are usually intended to improve student learning. There is a substantial and helpful literature on teaching and learning which can guide analysis of the context, choice of appropriate teaching and learning tactics, and evaluation of the impact of strategic changes on the quality of student learning. Some institutions refer to this literature in their contextual analysis and use it to justify particular plans or actions. For a few, the literature provides the main rationale for their strategy. A brief summary of two areas of this literature can be found in Annex 2.

    Principles of organisational change

  2. Many learning and teaching strategies are attempting to bring about organisational change. There is a substantial literature on organisational change, and while much of it has been developed to explain phenomena outside higher education, some of these principles can provide valuable guidance. A summary of some of the most relevant principles can be found in Annex 3.

    Supporting innovation

  3. A good deal is known about the conditions under which innovation takes place in industry. Recently, a research project in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Learning Society programme studied the conditions under which innovation in learning and teaching is most likely to take place in higher education. The findings support many of the emphases summarised above (such as the importance of appropriate reward and recognition for innovative teachers), and make useful additional points. These findings are summarised in Annex 4.

    Learning from the development of learning and teaching strategies in other countries

  4. Institutions in England are not alone in developing learning and teaching strategies. There are isolated examples of universities and colleges developing sophisticated strategies in many countries. In Australia, government policy and funding have led to all higher education institutions drawing up and implementing strategies, some in a very well-developed form. A great deal can be learnt from these institutions, some of which have placed all their documentation, and even internal debates, on their public web-site. Annex 5 summarises overseas experience and provides short case studies from three Australian institutions.

Annex 1

Methodology and key findings of the review of institutional learning and teaching strategies

This summary is taken from HEFCE 99/48.

Methodology

  1. The Council commissioned Professor Graham Gibbs of the Centre for Higher Education Practice at the Open University (CeHEP) to carry out a review of learning and teaching strategies. This review has been used to inform the development of the funding methodology, as well as to identify good practice in the sector.

  2. In January 1999, 134 HEIs were asked to return a short questionnaire and any documentation relevant to any learning and teaching strategy. In all, 116 replies were received, a response rate of 87 per cent. This indicates the widespread interest in the subject.

  3. The study was also informed by a review of other documents and publications, telephone interviews with those responsible for institutional learning and teaching strategies, and information provided by staff in about 30 institutions in other countries. All responses to the review will be treated as confidential, and no identifying details will be divulged without an institution’s permission.

    Key findings

  4. About half of all institutions claimed that they already have a learning and teaching strategy of some kind and the other half report that their strategy is already under development. Only 3 per cent of our respondents had no plans to develop such a strategy, and only a very small number questioned the value of learning and teaching strategies.

  5. However, the documentation showed that most strategies were under development rather than comprehensive. As one would expect, the documentation was also extremely variable in both content and scope.

  6. The most effective strategies outlined what the institution wished to achieve with regard to learning and teaching, how it would do so, and how it would know when it had succeeded. Successful strategies are also reviewed or revised regularly.

  7. Less effective strategies contained only some of the possible components; in particular, only about one-third of learning and teaching strategies contained targets, plans for implementation, methods of monitoring progress, or a way of evaluating impact. It is important to include these so that institutions can tell if the implementation of their current learning and teaching strategy is effective or worthwhile.

  8. Most activity related to learning and teaching strategies is very recent, having anticipated or been prompted by the NCIHE Report. As a result, few institutions have experience of implementing a strategy over a period, or revising it in the light of experience. About 90 per cent of learning and teaching strategies are either drafts or in their first cycle of implementation. This is therefore an ideal time to encourage collaboration and the sharing of good practices in the development and implementation of these strategies.

    Components of learning and teaching strategies

  9. Learning and teaching strategies were found to contain one or more of the following 12 components, in varying combinations. Boundaries between these components are not always clear cut and the language used to describe them varies greatly. The categories found were:

    1. Context: an analysis of the problems or environment the institution finds itself in that produce the pressures to change. Examples included meeting the needs of more diverse students, overcoming reduced resources, increasing retention and improving QAA outcomes.

    2. Process of creation: a description of how and why the strategy was developed and how ‘ownership’ was achieved.

    3. Objectives: a statement of where the institution is trying to get to in terms of learning and teaching, and a rationale for this in the form of a mission or vision. Examples include: improving access for specified student groups, improving retention, and increasing student employability.

    4. Culture: what kind of culture or cultures the institution wants (for example, a ‘learning organisation’, a ‘student-centred’ culture) and what mechanisms might help to achieve it.

    5. Targets: to progress towards objectives in ways which can be measured or monitored, ideally with realistic schedules or milestones.

    6. Curriculum: changes it is envisaged that the institution will need to make in its pattern of course provision.

    7. Learning, teaching and assessment practices: the teaching, learning and assessment methods or learning outcomes which it is envisaged that lecturers and courses will need to adopt or emphasise. This may include details of how synergies between teaching and research are exploited.

    8. Quality assurance: mechanisms for reviewing courses and, in some instances, for monitoring the implementation of learning and teaching policy.

    9. Quality enhancement, infrastructure changes and resourcing: processes that are designed to improve quality. These include: staff training and development, funding for projects, sharing of good practices, infrastructure changes in the use of learning or laboratory space, library provision, staffing duties and contracts, reward and promotion mechanisms, the way the institution resources learning and teaching, and the uses of information technology.

    10. Implementation: how the process of change will be managed, specifying the responsibilities of individuals and committees and, where possible, schedules. This element sometimes showed how external partnerships and collaboration might be developed.

    11. Monitoring: how the institution will know if the strategy has been implemented, sometimes overlapping with existing quality assurance mechanisms.

    12. Evaluation: how the institution will know if the implementation has been effective, in terms of improving learning and teaching.

    Process of developing and implementing a learning and teaching strategy

  10. Professor Gibbs found that the likelihood that a learning and teaching strategy would be successfully implemented depended in part on how it was created, and how ‘ownership’ was achieved within the institution.

  11. The consultation process varied considerably:

    1. Some institutions encouraged a wide and creative debate using web-based discussions, working groups, focus groups and discussion papers. An institutional learning and teaching committee then drew these discussions together into a document.

    2. Other institutions established a learning and teaching committee which considered papers drafted by the chair of the committee. These were then sent to departments for their views and on to Senate for approval.

    3. Another approach involved a 15-month consultation process and a paper issued by a pro vice-chancellor (academic). There was both a formal process through institutional committees and more informal input from groups and individuals.

  12. Communicating an institution’s learning and teaching strategy to the whole academic community is essential if it is to be an instrument of organisational reorientation and development. However, a number of institutions had experienced very long periods of consultation and had not been able to finalise a strategy.

  13. The method of communication of an agreed strategy varied from web-sites, to well- presented pamphlets, to substantial written documents. These documents appeared to address different audiences and varied from those oriented to an external audience, to those concerned with regulations and procedures, to those addressing the wide audience of staff. A fourth type was open and self-critical and written to engage colleagues in a debate.

  14. There are some examples of comprehensive learning and teaching strategies which have clear approaches for ‘embedding’ them. For example, one HEI used existing management and quality assurance structures, but introduced new goals, values and processes.

Annex 2

Some principles from the literature on learning and teaching

  1. The overall purpose of any learning and teaching strategy is to improve students’ learning. It can be helpful to think through what it means to improve students’ learning as an overarching conceptual framework to a strategy. A range of accessible literature is available to support such an analysis (Entwistle, 1992).The University of Adelaide’s ‘Quality Guide’ contains a preliminary section entitled ‘Characteristics of good quality in teaching and learning’ which draws on the literature, such as a summary of more than 3,000 studies by Pascarella and Terenzini (1991). This is followed by an extended section entitled ‘Implementing the characteristics’ which considers each point in turn and its implications for teaching and assessment practice. Two areas of literature often used by institutions to underpin their learning and teaching strategy are summarised below. Both are referred to by the University of Adelaide.

  2. In the USA, the Ford Foundation funded a group of scholars of learning in higher education to attempt to summarise what was known in a series of principles, each well supported by theory and empirical evidence about the conditions under which learning is likely to flourish. The result was the ‘Seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education’ (Chickering and Gamson, 1987):

    1. Good practice encourages student-faculty contact.

    2. Good practice encourages co-operation among students.

    3. Good practice encourages active learning.

    4. Good practice gives prompt feedback.

    5. Good practice emphasises time on task.

    6. Good practice communicates high expectations.

    7. Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

    These principles have been adopted as the basis of strategic improvement programmes at a number of institutions, and conferences and publications have reviewed institutional attempts to improve learning and teaching, directed by these principles.

  3. In Australia, the ‘Course Experience Questionnaire’ (CEQ) is administered every year to all graduates alongside a graduate destinations survey, and provides comparative data on every degree programme at every institution. The findings are published and considered at annual conferences (Johnson, 1998). The CEQ is a product of 20 years of studies of student learning based on research undertaken in Sweden in the 1970s (Marton, Hounsell and Entwistle 1997). The concept at the heart of this work is the approach to learning: whether students take a deep approach (attempting to understand) or a surface approach (attempting to memorise). Research has demonstrated the extent of the impact of students’ approach on the quality and quantity of their learning outcomes, and also what features of teaching and course design tend to lead to students taking a deep or a surface approach. The CEQ (in some versions) measures several of these features and also the extent to which students take a deep or surface approach. It is possible to change students’ approach and improve their learning outcomes through innovations in teaching (Newble and Clarke, 1986; Gibbs, 1992). Students adopt a surface approach to a greater extent in large classes, and courses with large enrolments gain poorer ratings on every scale of the CEQ (Lucas et al, 1996). Teachers with a ‘teacher-focused’ teaching strategy are more likely to foster a surface approach in their students than those with a ‘student-focused’ teaching strategy (Trigwell and Prosser, 1999). A wide international movement has grown up concerned with improving students’ learning, based on this area of research (see Rust, 1999). The following list of some of the features that foster a surface approach or a deep approach could be used by institutions to make broad policy decisions about curricula and assessment as part of their learning and teaching strategy (Biggs, 1999):

    Course features fostering a surface approach:

    Course features fostering a deep approach:

  4. There is also a substantial empirical literature on the impact of attempts to improve teaching. For example, most institutions collect student feedback at the end of term, despite the evidence that most ‘home-grown’ feedback questionnaires are unreliable and cannot predict learning outcomes and that collecting such feedback, on its own, is unlikely to have much impact on the quality of teaching. If you want to get maximum benefit from such feedback, you need to collect it mid-term, have an immediate consultation about the feedback and act on the basis of this consultation (Marsh, 1987). Such evidence can guide attempts to improve teaching.

  5. Some institutions feel more of an obligation than others to be scholarly in their attempts to improve teaching. Their learning and teaching strategy reflects this, in that it is justified and referenced to a standard of argument, theory and evidence that academics would normally expect.

  6. The literature on learning and teaching, and the research tools associated with it, can be valuable in developing plans to evaluate the impact of learning and teaching strategies (see paragraph 56).

Annex 3

Some principles from the literature on organisational change

  1. The literature on organisational change and organisational development is vast. The overwhelming majority of it relates to industrial and commercial concerns in which chief executive officers have considerable authority and power. Many in higher education would wonder about the relevance of this literature to their own context, in which organisational units are often relatively loosely coupled to ‘the centre’, the powers of heads of institutions are more circumscribed, and individual academics have a high degree of autonomy.

  2. Yet higher education institutions in the UK are becoming more corporate in their approach as they are faced with the challenges of responding on an institution-wide basis to opportunities in, and pressures from, the external environment. Organisational units are increasingly being required to demonstrate how their activities are supporting institutional policies. Though considerable local (and individual) autonomy still exists, it is nevertheless constrained. In other words, the organisational climate of the higher education institution is edging a little closer towards that of the industrial or commercial concern. With appropriate caution and adjustments, the literature on organisational change does offer some useful general pointers to how an institution might handle the implementation of a learning and teaching strategy – particularly where this is concerned with radical change.

  3. A learning and teaching strategy implies coherence in approach. This applies at the level of the whole institution and/or the organisational units. The 10 broad principles below, which are primarily based on Argyris (1990) and Kotter (1996), have a utility value for academic leaders irrespective of the level of engagement. Kotter (1990) makes a distinction between leadership and management which is helpful when reflecting on the principles. In brief, a leader is concerned with setting a direction, motivating people and gaining their willingness to support action, whereas a manager is more concerned with the practicalities of bringing about change. Middlehurst (1993, pp 129-132) indicates ways in which the leadership role varies with level in the institution, at least in pre-1992 universities. In the principles sketched below, elements of both leadership and management can be perceived, since the roles overlap to a considerable extent.

    Principle 1: Develop a vision and strategy

  4. In higher education it would be unwise for leaders to produce visions and strategies as finished products and then expect others to adopt them uncritically, since academics tend to (and are expected to) adopt a sceptical stance towards matters. Monash University, for example, makes a point of acknowledging that its learning and teaching operational plan is subject to review in the light of experience and developments. It is better to engage colleagues in a problem-solving consultation exercise in order to gain a broad measure of support for the emergent vision and strategy, as illustrated in Case study 14. The leader’s role here is to have an appropriate sense of direction and the skills to keep a focus on the task. Practical realities mean that many institutions will not, in their first attempts at producing a documented learning and teaching strategy, have the time to consult their staff. In such circumstances, a more modest consultation would need to be followed up by a commitment to review and refine what would necessarily be a provisional document.

    Principle 2: Establish a sense of necessity

  5. Explain why a learning and teaching strategy is needed, and why the issue has to be dealt with now. The HEFCE initiative is an obvious external driver for change, but many academics are unhappy with the pressures under which they are currently working. It could well be helpful to bring into the picture an analytical envisioning of how their time might be used more effectively, and satisfyingly. Kotter (1996) claims that by far the biggest mistake made in seeking to change an organisation is to press ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency across the organisation.

    Principle 3: Create a guiding coalition

  6. Assemble a team of staff that has sufficient power to lead developments. The team should not be composed of senior staff appointed merely because of their rank, but should include others who have appropriate expertise. It is important that the team actually works as a team, so the team leader needs to be selected with this in mind. Argyris (1990) points out, as a cautionary note, that ‘the management team’ is often a myth. Lone champions of change are insufficient (for an illustration of this point, see Taylor, 1998).

    Principle 4: Communicate widely and continuously

  7. Communicating once is almost certainly not enough: for all sorts of reasons, people have their attention diverted from the vision and strategy. Reminders, carefully handled, are a good idea. So is ‘walking the talk’ – being prepared to meet with groups of staff and to enter into dialogue are both evidence of commitment, and maximise the possibility of support. Be prepared to be misunderstood. Actions intended to increase understanding and trust often have the opposite effect, as others look at the issues from different standpoints. Hence, again, the need to engage in clarification and dialogue. A leader should use simple and direct language. For example, Latin phrases and ‘bureaucratese’ in communications to all staff are unlikely to strike much of a chord.

    Principle 5: Be prepared to listen

  8. The prospect of change almost inevitably brings difficult issues to the surface. If the change process is perceived by staff as not taking their concerns into account, then it is less likely to be successful. It is important to ensure that ‘upward communication’ of difficult issues can take place, and that the concerns expressed are given fair treatment.

    Principle 6: Develop a shared commitment

  9. Organisational life, particularly in higher education, tends to be ‘untidy’, so attempts to manage change in organisations need to recognise this. Sometimes people do not behave ‘reasonably’, even when to do so seems to be incontrovertibly in their best interest. Human systems do not always cohere particularly well with a technical-rational approach to change, not least because change tends to move people out of their individual and organisational ‘comfort zones’. One of the most difficult things to do is to unlearn the behaviours that led to past success. A shared commitment is not to be confused with clone-like behaviour. Academics do not fit this model anyway. A shared commitment to a strategy brings with it the possibility of creative and productive tensions: the trick is to balance purposeful and cohesive advance with tolerance for dissent and new ideas. In mature organisations a shared mind-set can be a liability.

    Principle 7: Generate some early successes

  10. As the saying goes, success breeds success. The implementation of a learning and teaching strategy is complex. Full implementation of what might have been envisaged could well take a considerable time, so convert the overall strategy into manageable chunks that are ‘deliverable’ against a time-frame. A rolling programme of emphases helps to keep things manageable while moving the agenda on. Ensure that successes are recognised and rewarded (see paragraphs 77-84) and make sure that there is no great discrepancy between rhetoric and ‘reward-in-action’ (Argyris and Schön, 1974).

    Principle 8: Realise when ‘game-playing’ is going on, and deal with it

  11. Game-playing can be used to slow down change, or to present the appearance of change while maintaining the status quo. The alert leader will recognise the symptoms, and will be aware that what is professed is not necessarily consistent with action (see Argyris and Schön, 1974, for the distinction between espoused theories and theories-in-use). Also recognise that academics will respond differently to change. Trowler (1998) identified, in a new university faced with changes in curricular structure, how personal response strategies varied: ‘sinking’ fatalistically; coping with the change, but performing less well in other aspects of work; seeing opportunities arising from within the change; and finding ways to reconstruct policy relating to the change. The conversion of the strategy into manageable chunks helps here, since it is less easy to bury ‘the deliverables’ in some relatively unspecific assertion of a general good which is representative of the strategic intentions.

    Principle 9: Consolidate and embed the gains

  12. ‘Chunking’ the strategy runs the risk that once one component has been achieved, the strategy is left to lapse. Make sure that achievements are consolidated, and built into future work. The history of educational innovation is littered with immediate successes that were not embedded by the time the project funding ran out, and thus died. If the institutional culture is one where authority for implementation is highly devolved, ensure that mechanisms exist (and work) for checking that organisational units (there may be more than one level involved) are doing what the strategy expects them to be doing.

    Principle 10: Do not rest on your laurels

  13. All the ‘quality gurus’ point to the need to re-examine practices continuously, and to strive for improvement. There is always a temptation to declare victory too soon, or to mistake success in a few components for success in the overall strategy.

Annex 4

Supporting innovation

  1. The ESRC Learning Society programme includes a project entitled ‘Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’. It has involved studying award-winning innovations in many institutions and the context of innovation in many more, in order to understand the conditions under which innovations in learning and teaching are most likely to flourish. The research is not yet complete or published. The key findings, which have significant and clear implications for the development and implementation of learning and teaching strategies, are summarised below.

    Innovation in teaching and learning is most likely to take place when:

    Innovation is most likely to be obstructed by:

  2. The ‘Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’ project (1997-99) has been conducted at the University of Plymouth by Dr Andrew Hannan, Professor Harold Silver and Ms Susan English. The project, part of the ESRC Learning Society programme, has been funded by the ESRC, HEQC, DfEE and HEFCE.

    Contact: Dr A Hannan at Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth, EX8 2AT or e-mail: a.hannan@plymouth.ac.uk.

    Many of the project outcomes can be accessed at: http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk/itlhe.html

Annex 5

Learning from the development of learning and teaching strategies in other countries

  1. Around the world, institutions have been coming to terms with the need to be more strategic in their approach. ‘Environmental scans’ have been a feature of higher education in the USA as institutions have been faced with demographic changes (for example, the growth in numbers of Hispanics in the southern parts of Texas and California), expectations of states, funding streams, the growth of private institution competition, developments in C&IT and so on. Miami-Dade Community College, for example, has conducted scans of its internal and external environments and has, for each environmental component, assessed what the impact on the college is likely to be. Environmental scanning is an important first step towards developing an institutional learning and teaching strategy.

  2. Australian higher education is perhaps more similar to the English higher education system. In the mid-1990s, changes in quality assurance in Australian higher education appear to have stimulated strategic thinking about learning and teaching and may also have influenced developments in New Zealand (see, for example, the University of Otago ‘Teaching and Learning Plan 1996’).

  3. The University of Western Australia, which makes an explicit connection between its teaching and learning management plan and other components of its broader strategic plan, has identified nine primary objectives to which are attached a number of strategies (note that the word ‘strategy’ is used to different effect at the two levels). Objective 1 is ‘To provide high-quality teaching and learning opportunities in all ... discipline areas’. Those strategies that most directly connect the objective and the theme of learning and teaching are listed below.

    Strategies adopted by the University of Western Australia

  4. A particularly developed example is the University of Queensland’s ‘Teaching and Learning Enhancement Plan 1997-99.’ A flavour of the thinking that has gone into the plan is provided below. There are of course some unarticulated cross-linkages between the items in the table.

    Components of the teaching and learning enhancement plan at the University of Queensland

    Focus of strategy

    Examples of mechanisms

    Enhancing teaching and learning

    • incentives and rewards to departments/schools through the funding formula and other funding initiatives

    • incentives and rewards to individuals through the tenure and promotions processes and teaching excellence awards

    • the use of operating grant funds to enable strategic change

    Staff development

    • basic training for academic staff without previous experience

    • training for tutors

    • in-service professional development

    Quality of courses

    • a multi-faceted approach to course evaluation

    • internal and external peer review regarding the quality of what is offered within subject disciplines

    • developmental staff appraisal relating to the quality of teaching

  5. Monash University’s ‘Learning and Teaching Operational Plan 1999’ has a number of similarities with that of the University of Western Australia, though it relates strategies more explicitly to primary objectives through reference to context. The plan is acknowledged as being to some extent provisional, in that it is seen as an integrated part of the university’s rolling planning and review cycle. Circumstances change, and the literature on organisational development shows that successful organisations are those that do not embed their plans in concrete, but instead are alert to the need to adjust from time to time. A lengthier and earlier operational draft plan at Monash contained an extended tabulation of strategies, who is responsible for action, and targets and timelines. Comments or recommendations were placed against some of the rows of the tabulation where necessary. This is exemplified in the extract below, which is one row of a table under the general heading of ‘Improving the teaching environment’.

    Excerpt from Monash University’s ‘Learning and Teaching Operational Plan 1998’

    Strategies

    Action responsibilities

    Targets/ timelines

    Comments/

    Recommendations

    Recognise and reward excellent teaching

    C1 Provide rewards for high-quality teaching and teaching innovation and output, in terms of peer recognition and funding

    C1.1 Consider a scheme to establish parity between teaching and research in terms of upper grades of academic rank

    University working party, chaired by a professor

    Establish working party, 1998. Report to Academic Board mid-1999

    Designated title to be confirmed

  6. Griffith University has an overall ‘Teaching and Learning Management Plan 1999-2001’ which provides a framework for the work of the university’s academic organisational units. In 1998, each of these units started with the university’s expressed priorities for strategic development and gave them particular emphases and/or added to them. This has allowed an interesting, and for the comparative analyst an illuminating, divergence of approach to occur. For example, Queensland College of Art picked up on three of the four institutional priorities and showed why it had done so; in contrast, the Faculty of Engineering produced what it termed a sub-set of priorities, though these seemed in practice to be more like additions to the original institutional set. A key issue for the central management at the university is how to retain coherence between the academic organisational units as their strategies evolve under the dispensation of subsidiarity.

    Using learning and teaching strategies over a period of time

  7. This guidance has been written when the majority of English institutions are at an early stage in developing and working with their learning and teaching strategy. The experience of institutions that started some years ago provides pointers to what happens after the initial period.
    1. Strategies are simplified so that they are easier to understand, there is a clearer focus on the central goals, and effort is not dissipated in too many initiatives at once. The number of goals may be reduced to three, two or even one. Scheduling of initiatives may be staggered so that they do not all start at once.

    2. A longer-`term perspective is gained, with targets set for five years ahead instead of only for the following year. This often accompanies a simplification of goals so that the eventual goal is clearly in focus, instead of just the immediate action.

    3. More emphasis is placed on devolved responsibility to implement the strategy, accompanied by more devolved decision-making about exactly how the strategy will be implemented in local contexts. It is recognised that there is a limit to what can be achieved from the centre without strong engagement by departments and support units. This engagement may be achieved at the expense of the purity and clarity of the original vision or goals.

    4. Much more consultation and communication are undertaken to build stronger staff commitment to the strategy and to make sure it is congruent with beliefs and values that staff are prepared to work with. Institutions that set out without any such consultation may have to start again from scratch, having already alienated staff or fostered a degree of scepticism.

    5. The initial strategy is viewed as provisional, however much effort went into its creation, and annual planning of action may be set within a moving five-year horizon. Institutions accept that the context is changing, priorities are changing, and that some elements of the strategy will prove, with experience, to be more productive than others. Implementing the strategy is seen as being more like continuous quality improvement, albeit much more directed and strategic improvement than in the past, rather than a one-off change from ‘state A’ to ‘state B’.

    6. More effort is put into providing support for change rather than just stating that it ought to happen. More change mechanisms are put in place and funded appropriately. Ways to free staff time to work with the strategy have to be found.

    7. More effort is put into management and monitoring of change so that efforts are co-ordinated and the institution knows what is working and what is not. Continuing with efforts that only the centre believes are working may not be sustainable for long.

    8. There is a recognition that the cultural and value shift associated with a new vision of learning and teaching may involve a long, slow process to achieve. For example, it can take many years from the start of an initiative to reward excellent teachers before excellent teachers are regularly rewarded in ways that staff find credible and which succeeds in reorienting academics’ daily work.

    The most important learning point is that the implementation of learning and teaching strategies is a long-term process which requires continuous attention. Producing the strategy is only the first of many steps and should not be rushed.

  8. The development of the Australian higher education system during the mid-1990s has resulted in a greater level of attention being paid to learning and teaching strategies than has been typical of UK higher education institutions. For those charged with the development of learning and teaching strategies at institutional or organisational-unit level, the web-sites of Australian institutions provide a number of helpful points of departure.

    Some selected Australian material from the world-wide web

    Griffith University (1999) Teaching and Learning Management Plan 1999-2001 at http://www.gu.edu.au/ua/aa/tal/tlmp/TL_Mgt_Plan_1999_2001.html

    Faculty-level plans at http://www.gu.edu.au/ua/aa/tal/tlmp/TL_Mgt_TOC.html

    University of Queensland (1997) Teaching and Learning Enhancement Plan 1997-99 at http://www.admin.uq.edu.au/AcadBoardOffice/policy/TLEP.html

    [This URL seems to have been retired; but a variety of current UQ T&L policy documents appear to be available at: http://www.admin.uq.edu.au/AcadBoardOffice/policy/policy_index.htm -- ODTL, 11-Feb-2000.]

    University of Western Australia (1998) ‘Teaching and Learning: Planning, Management and Quality Assurance’ at http://www.acs.uwa.edu.au/csd/TLplan.html

Annex 6

Institutional information strategies

  1. An institution’s learning and teaching strategy often sits alongside its research strategy within an overall institutional mission and operational plan. These may be underpinned by strategies and policies concerned with the infrastructure of the institution, an important component of which is the information strategy. The UK higher education funding bodies' Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) defines the role and nature of an information strategy in the following way:

    ‘An effective information strategy will ensure that investment in information, information technology, systems and services is efficient and effective; and that information produced within the institution is exploited to the benefit of the institution. An information strategy provides a focus for information issues and a forum for a wide range of people to consider the institution's information needs. The information strategy must flow from the strategic plan of the institution and help to achieve its mission. As such, it is a tool for management, a means by which changes can be brought about, and attitudes and culture amended. It enables management to take account of the views of other members of the institution (staff and students) and to feed back their own priorities. An information strategy is not a document, although it is likely that an information strategy document will be produced as part of the process.’

    (JISC) Senior Management Briefing Paper 3: Information Strategies

  2. The remainder of this Annex is edited from the JISC publication: ‘Information Strategies: An Executive Briefing’ (1998). Other publications and guidance about information strategies are available on the JISC web-site at http://www.jisc.ac.uk

  3. In relation to teaching, information strategies are concerned with decisions about matters such as:

  4. Each of the above is concerned with the handling of information. Information is at the very heart of an institution, providing the foundation for the development of knowledge and understanding.

  5. Such matters are critically important, and for two reasons. First, the higher education environment has undergone a fundamental change in the last few years. Second, the technology revolution has produced many new opportunities for higher education, few of which have yet been fully grasped.

  6. The environment changes are well known:

  7. New technology has facilitated some of the above developments; for others, it can help address their consequences. It has the potential to revolutionise the ways in which institutions arrange and undertake their core activities of teaching, learning and research. But new technology is expensive, so any investment in it needs to be carefully planned with a clear idea about how it will help to realise the intended potential. Of course, some of this potential has already been realised: much has not. Examples of the potential include:

    What is an information strategy?

  8. It is the view of JISC that the best way to think of an information strategy is as a set of attitudes rather than as a report. In the now hackneyed phrase, the information strategy needs to start from, but also encapsulate, a shared vision of the future of the institution. More specifically, an information strategy is a set of attitudes in which:

  9. The information with which an information strategy is concerned should thus cover teaching and learning materials (in all media), research information and data, and the management information needed to plan and monitor the delivery of teaching, learning and research. Such information may or may not be held on computers and may or may not be found in libraries. It is clear that, on this definition, an information strategy lies at the academic heart of an institution; it is not an optional extra and its creation and maintenance justify the close attention and support of the vice-chancellor or principal.

  10. The Funding Councils have asked each institution to demonstrate the extent to which it has developed an information strategy to support teaching and learning, research and management. To this end, JISC published, in April 1995, an Issues Paper which discussed means of exploiting information systems in higher education into the next decade. The paper set out some of the technological trends which can be expected, along with some of their possible consequences for higher education.

  11. The next steps to be taken are:

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