A chara, – Dr Paul Mooney provides an eccentric collection of opinions and anecdotes that aim to tell us “What’s really going on in higher education” (Education Today, March 20th). Sadly it fails as a piece of journalism, in that it provides scant information, sources or facts to support these opinions and offers little concrete material for rational or educated debate.
The university system in Ireland has extensive quality assurance procedures and is scrutinised to levels rare in the public or private sectors. Take the example of teaching, a typical lecturer will receive feedback on each module from the students and such feedback will be available to the head of department; each year teaching units review their courses and open the methodology and material to colleagues for peer review and improvement; the system of external examiners (often international) scrutinise standards and alert universities to problem areas; faculties or similar structures inspect under- (or over-) performing modules; finally departments and faculties throw their doors open for five-yearly forensic review by international experts in teaching and research as part of the quality review process.
In addition, my own university has a parallel track, whereby elected student class representatives can speak directly to the dean of faculty on any academic matter, including lecturer quality. In the criteria for lecturer promotion, verifiable performance in teaching and learning are afforded equal weighting to performance in research.
The above system may need improvement, but claims that it does not support teaching, or that performance in this area is not managed, do not reflect the performance indicators in current use and the educational changes they have driven.
If I had received this piece of writing from a student, I would add: “A provocative article, but make better use of objective evidence to support your ideas in future, C-”. – Is mise,
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Sir, – “Inside third level” (Education Today, March 20th) is a fascinating piece, not least because of the breath-taking ignorance it displays of its subject. This is surprising, since the author, Dr Paul Mooney, seems to have worked in education for a time. If he had any serious interest in discussing this topic, he would have engaged with some of the reports on third-level education in Ireland (eg, OECD, 2009; Hunt Report, 2011), which note the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of an underfunded sector. Or he might comment on the quality-assurance measures that Irish third-level institutions have put in place in recent years in relation to teaching. Instead, he prefers to beg the question, and take as his starting point that there is something terribly wrong with teaching in Irish colleges and universities, without citing any evidence whatsoever to support this assumption.
He then moves on to a series of equally unsubstantiated claims about the shortcomings of research and academic administration.
Since the sloppiness of this article, even as an opinion piece, must have been obvious to The Irish Times, I can only assume that the point of it was not to “start a dialogue” on education, as the article disingenuously claims, but simply to put the boot into the public sector. How refreshing! – Yours, etc,
Sir, – I am a full-time mature student who has worked for 20 years in multinational companies before returning voluntarily to college to study journalism.
Like many mature students, I have worked in several management roles within the public sector, where the focus on performance management, efficiency and continuous improvement was a given. What most shocked me about the college environment is how much these are absent organisationally — it seems they are deemed applicable only in relation to student performance.
The administrative inefficiency never ceases to amaze me. The feeling of inertia is palpable – this is just how things are done. Change comes at an evolutionary pace. There seems to be no energy or appetite for a culture of cross-functional continuous improvement. And what is worse, current cutbacks to administrative staff mean that some lecturers are having to step in to fill the gap – instead of a focus being on how to cut the waste from those unwieldy administrative processes.
The amount of wasted time within some courses is very surprising. My four-year undergraduate course could easily be compressed into two. This slow pace and lack of pressure is a huge demotivating factor for students and attendance suffers.
I look forward to graduation when I hope to be able to publish an article on “How you can earn a 2.2 degree while only attending 40 hours of class”.
I’ve worked in internet companies where we would make more organisational changes and process improvements in one month than I have seen in college in my three years – it’s an attitude of mind that is completely missing in colleges. Does it get beaten out of them? – Yours, etc,
Sir, – In the TBH column (Education Today, March 20th), we have an anonymous parent sharing the views of his 17-year-old that because he doesn’t use “the Irish verbs, Shakespeare plays, maths equations or French letter writing techniques” he learned in school, that there is considerable doubt about whether “a lot of this stuff is worth learning”.These views are, of course, commonplace and unremarkable. Yet in the same Education section we learn that the former head of a third-level institution in Ireland also shares these views and thinks these kinds of things are mere “personal interests” of faculty and not worth researching because they don’t contribute to “Ireland, Inc.” O tempora, o mores, as Olli Rehn might say. – Yours, etc,