As we meet the milestone of a month back in Edinburgh, the workload for many is beginning to pile on. It’s around the time when early lectures are losing their allure, and plans to keep up with assigned readings start to slip.
We’re all aware of the phrase ‘you get out what you put in,’ a wise maxim that rightfully applies to all elements of university life. Yet in the case of many people’s degrees, an emphasis on independent learning through the form of endless assigned reading is not just an element of the degree, it’s almost the entirety of it. With the lowest end of contact hours being a mere nine out of the recommended 40 study hours a week, is the glorification of students having academic independence just a guise for the fact that many are paying more than £9,500 to be self-taught?
Academics Katie Bowles and Richard Hall have written about the damage that minimal staff-student interaction can have. They call higher education an “anxiety machine, where the projection of anxiety emerged through the fabric of relationships.” In other words, students with little academic support are made to question: ‘Am I productive enough?’, leading them to accuse others: ‘Are you productive enough?’, resulting in an internal, panicked dialogue which fosters competition between us, not cooperation.
A second-year English Literature student, who currently has two and a half contact hours in her subject per week, told The Student: “I do feel that low contact hours make people more focused on getting through assessments, because there’s not enough time given to engage in much else. Because we are expected to do most work alone, I always wonder when I walk into tutorials and lectures; ‘Has anyone done the reading?’”
The student disconnect that comes with low contact hours is only set to grow under Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson’s potential budget and staff cuts. According to predictions, 1,800 staff members are set to lose their jobs, causing tutorial and lecture cohorts to swell in size.
Over at King’s Buildings, one STEM student attending College of Science and Engineering staff meetings told The Student the support from staff she had in the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) was good, making the prospect of staff cuts “very dire.” Despite feeling supported in the SBS, she also commented: “my classes with the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences are far too independent and quite pitiful in comparison to the SBS ones.”
In addition to student opinion, research suggests that even students who say they are happy with low contact hours are often in denial. The Harvard Gazette published a study indicating that students need more intimate teacher interaction than they think, exposing that “actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated.” While many believed they were learning more from their ‘superstar lecturer’ through passive listening among a large cohort, it is classes that make time for active learning and student discussions that produce better results.
In light of such studies, are low contact hours something that lecturers at Edinburgh agree with? The Student spoke to a Course Organiser teaching at the school of Social and Political Sciences, who said: “I know there is an older stereotype of the professor who just wants to lecture and get on with research, but most lecturers I know would hugely value more contact time with students.” Until this year, her course was taught without tutorials. As is the case for many electives, a surplus of 70 students must be enrolled for the University to offer funding for tutors. Having now reached the threshold for the course to have tutorials, she said: “I find that student interaction through tutorials makes it easier to teach our course, because that’s how we can get to know the students.”
It’s not just contact hours which appear to make the difference; the way we are taught is important too. The lecturer went on to say: “Active and experiential learning are crucial” and although many professors “would really like to develop greater opportunities for experiential learning […] we need time and support to design courses in that way, and for that we need more colleagues.”
After drawing on all parts of the education sphere, from the theorists to the students to the lecturers, it appears that low contact hours are to no one’s benefit. Change is needed, but how can degrees be taught with more active engagement? We need to start a conversation between staff and students that campaigns for forms of learning that encourage community, not confinement. Otherwise, the only interaction students will continue to have is with the library’s bookshelves.
Photo by Guzel Maskutova on Unsplash