What’s the problem?

Credit: pixabay,geralt, CC0

“How do we deal with this expansion [of student numbers]? How do we still engage students early on with the world of engineering? How do we show them the messiness of engineering, the political and social aspects? … How do we do this beyond the capstone project? This type of education, the type of education we want to have, is expensive. So how do you do this for all students, large cohorts of students, without compromising on everything?”

-Interviewee quoted in  Graham, R. (2018)

This quote about engineering could equally apply to any subject with a practical work component. There’s also a nice reference in here to messy real-world skills, but I’ll park that for now. The message is that student cohorts are growing (1), our desire to provide active learning is growing (Graham 2010), and together they put a double whammy on our ability on our resources like staff time and teaching laboratory space. So we cannot do the sort of education we want, at the scale we now have and in the future (2), with the resources at our disposal, using only traditional methods. 

 


(1) The College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh had a total student headcount of 5390 in 2007/8, and 10,390 in 2017/8, which is a 41% increase.

(2) In my view, it’s unlikely to be financially attractive for institutions to reduce the scale at which they teach. And if there somehow was a dramatic, systematic reduction in student cohort sizes across the country, then it would most likely exacerbate existing issues around widening participation.