The Divide

The following is an excerpt of an Op-Ed I co-wrote with Emeritus Professor Martin Betts, Co-founder of HEDx. You can find the link to the full article at Campus Review.

How do five different generations view university teaching and learning?

Teachers often argue that they learn most when they teach something to others.  This seemed to go with the maxim that as a teacher you needed to be ahead, but only just ahead by an hour or so, of your students in having learnt a subject. But are our students catching up, or has their capability and expectation overtaken us?

A UCLA study showed that 85% of their students sped up recorded lectures. Experimental groups were played back lectures at 1x, 1.5x and 2x speed and had equal levels of comprehension.  This raises questions about how students are learning and what benefit arises from their extra flexibility and time.  How do teachers respond to the new generation of student expectations and practices particularly in a post-pandemic era? Teachers and universities shifting back now to offering real-time face to face experiences might see it suit their skills and assets, but it does not meet the expectations of a new generation of learners.

Each generation of students develops unique learning capabilities based on the environment they learn in. It is hard to imagine what this is like if you have not experienced it. This generational shift in student learning styles requires teachers and university leaders to put themselves in the shoes of current learners to respond to new expectations. All can learn from immersing themselves in and experiencing novel teaching experiences.  

While debates about the efficacy and equity of student evaluations are ongoing, learners are at least an important judge of learning experience. Student feedback is here to stay and the overall sense from the data from the last 3 years is clear. Taking a longer view back over the last twenty years provides a stark demonstration of how much change there has been, and how much more we will need.

One phenomena of the culture in all organisations is that 5G is being newly connected with. Not a new mobile or communications environment, but one where 5 generations of social and behavioural types are populating our workforces and campuses, physically and virtually. Universities are partly governed by traditionalists, largely led by executive boomers, with Gen x middle management, and millennial early career academics, predominantly teaching Gen Z students.  Which generation best understands change in needs of current learners?

Universities have always been multi-generational environments with continuous cohorts of new young learners, increasing numbers of mature learners and multi-generational teachers and leaders making decisions for all. Except of course students have now become increasingly empowered to make their own decisions of where, how, and when to learn by technological change and the acceleration of hybrid practices. 

The best time to reflect on effective teaching is most recently after having experienced it. It is a strong argument for ‘mystery learner’ tactics by teachers and leaders to add to their data from student feedback. And it is also a strong argument to allow recent learners and generations closest to current students to input to if not guide learning innovation. They are best paced to do so for fellow teachers of all generations, and for wider institutions trying to manage it for multiple learner and staff generations.

In my most recent video I attempted to summarise lessons from 7 phases of change through traditional chalk and talk lecturing being replaced by ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations, that blended in to emerging learning management systems, that became a vehicle for automated lecture recordings.  These were followed by the emergence of MOOCS and the turning to flipped classrooms, that all preceded our 2020 switch to covid/zoom deliveries of combinations of these techniques.  The video describes the current position being a ‘no man’s land’ of widespread classrooms empty of Gen Z learners who remotely access 2x recordings at times that suit them and their wider lives.

That tour through history and the reality of the current position generates an inarguable call of a need to change.  The biggest questions might be what and who needs to change, and how will it happen? Change needs us all to learn from lessons learnt from teaching practice, and reflect on the theory, through the eyes of other generations.  What needs to change is a focus towards student engagement and putting ourselves more into millennial and Gen Z shoes of expectations and preferences. Who needs to change means a combination of individual teachers and learners, institutions that employ and enrol them, and the whole sector and its emerging partners and new entrants.

You can find the link to the full article on Campus Review. You can also find out more about Martin’s work at HEDx via the website and the podcast.

Jack.