Jock's Backroom Blog

Formal Hall Menu, 17th January 2011:

Christ Church College Dining Hall

Cured Salmon Topped with Beetroot with a Rocket Salad

Passion Fruit and Lemon Tart with a Passion Fruit Cream

Price: £4.50 (waiter service)

Brookes Lunch Menu, Friday 13th Jan

Lasange, Chips, Garden Peas

Cabinet Pudding & Custard

Price: £6.06 (self service)

Brookes dinner menu:

Dinner?  You do that yourself, mate.

I’ll always remember Sir Clive Booth coming to open the halls that bear his name, and talking about how halls were part of us providing Maslow’s baser needs so our students could devote their energies to the higher pursuits of academia, community and high culture.  But while tinned spaghetti hoops and pot noodle are the dinner menu can we really expect self-actualisation to occur in our students quite as readily as with their well fed fellows less than a mile away?

Maybe it’s time, when the contract comes up for renewal, that we look seriously at a not-for-profit or social enterprise to do our catering, and sell at cost, rather than a contractor having to make an inappropriate mark-up out of cash-strapped students’ most basic needs?

I notice from what information we have available to us that all four of my modules this next semester will have examination based assessment.  In the case of the politics module, the exam is 100% of assessment.

Now I am sure there is a place for exams, but I suspect it is a lot less often than is actually the case.  It may be that my politics module is all about remembering facts, O level style, that can be regurgitated through a series of simple questions and answers, but it doesn’t sound right.  And the thought of inflicting one or more on hour essay type answers in my ageing handwriting on a marker is a little disturbing.

Further, it means we are not producing any assessable work throughout the module.  No essays and such like.

I read in an American academic’s blog a while back about one half-way house solution.  If you don’t want to hand out essay titles and have people read up on them and write a polished, cited, argument over a period of weeks, potentially allowing them to get someone else to do the work, then how about handing out an essay question for return the following day?  It gives minimal time to “cheat” but adequate time to spend on a decent argument, on setting the whole paper out with bibliography, citations and neatly type-written, and it doesn’t have to be done in a sweaty hall with 300 other students having had everything they’ve learned blown out of their heads by the volume and length of our Academic Registrar’s recorded reminder of examination rules.

All my other modules have exams this semester.  One module had an exam last semester (and that was, arguably at least, in Microeconomics, one of those subjects where facts and definitions can be tested in examination conditions).

Some thought needs to go into this.

I’ll try and wrap up with this post, and roll the issues of support both on and off campus, in and out of core hours, into one post.  I will probably still do a separate one about the future of halls of residence as well, but cover the basics in this one.

I have to say that whenever I’ve been to see the Student Support Co-ordinators they’ve been very helpful.  I’ve not really seen them about anything terribly complex yet, and I haven’t yet felt the need to visit Upgrade or my Academic Adviser so I can’t comment on them at all.  However I do find that as with other areas those of us whose course modules are delivered by different Faculties sometimes fall between the gaps I think.  The SSCs and Academic Adviser are of course, rightly, the ones in the faculty delivering the whole subject – in my case, Business.  But they are not in a position to answer questions on what amounts to fully half our course, those bits delivered by Humanities and Social Sciences.

A similar situation arises with the course representatives meetings – they are arranged by Department, so the meetings I go to only review their own modules, so we don’t get in on the discussion of modules in Politics and International Relations.  My understanding is that when everyone was simply on one or more fields, they had reps for each field, so if we had built a course simply by adding an economics field and a politics field together we would have been able to be reps on both (or perhaps either) field.  Something needs to change here I think.  One proposal was to have the program leads from Politics and International Relations attend some of our subject rep meetings in Wheatley, but I think that would be wasteful.  We might as well attend the equivalent meetings in both faculties – it needn’t be the same reps at each, so perhaps we could divide up the jobs between the IX course reps.

Halls of Residence

But my main beef on support is less directly concerned with the faculties themselves and more about “student life” – if you will the time outside contact hours and office hours and so on when, let’s face it, most of us end up doing our coursework, revision and so on.  And for me the focus for this is halls of residence.  I’ve been a warden for many years now and I’m a bit fed up of the various changes to the warden service that have diminished the service in my view.  And I’m even more fed up of not having my experience taken much into account when people who run the service make decisions.  It’s not as if I am backward in coming forward!

I am still learning – none more so than this semester when, though not exactly the same as fellow students in halls (in that I am a warden and they are paying residents), I have also found myself doing coursework at home in halls.  My feeling is that when Year 9k comes next year, those forking out another £5k plus for what in reality amounts to 24 or 25 weeks of useful occupancy, they are going to expect much more from halls in terms of support for both academic and social activities.

Our headline rents are around £100-£135 per week, usually for 38 weeks.  But for years now we have steadily increased the amount students are expected to pay for.  When I first started, I think they were on 33 week contracts, where they would pay for each term (week 1 to week 10), were expected to move out over each holiday (Christmas, Easter and the long vacation) so we could use halls for conferences and the like.  They paid, effectively, for the time they needed to be here.  Now thy have to pay throughout the Christmas vacation and for around three weeks after examinations finish in summer.  All in all, if you are in a £135 a week room, you can be paying the best part of £200 per week for the weeks you actually use (and if your lectures etc fit the right pattern, you can easily stay in Oxford two nights a week, with breakfast, for less).

Now of course the business of universities has changed.  We stopped expecting people to move out long before semesters started – when the Christmas and Easter conference trade became negligible.  Greater numbers of international students need accommodation throughout the academic year – though even these are, judging by the number of people actually in halls over the Christmas break, relatively few in number.  Right now, hall rent (indeed any accommodation) is the biggest expense compared with fees of £3k.  But when the choice is between £9k to study from home or £14k to stay away at university, I feel more people are going to want more of a connect between the academic day time activities and support in halls as part of a scholastic community.

As I proposed at the time hall wardens were last under discussion, I think we should be more like what other universities call “Moral Tutors”.  In our case it could be a mixture of the roles of Student Support Coordinators, Academic Advisers, Moral Tutors and Upgrade advisers.  And we should be split off from the Estates department again.  Still it seems from most universities job adverts for positions equivalent to wardens they mostly report into the Student Services and Support type function rather than the Estate management function.  Indeed even where universities, such as Reading, have outsourced the management of all their halls to UPP, they expect their wardens to come from the professoriat and other senior academics.

Since we have been run out of the Estates department, the recruitment has focussed on students, probably more easily managed than us obstreperous old timers with opinions on how to run things based on living there for a long time and experiencing what the students actually experience.

I understand we do not have a project in the Program for the Enhancement of the Student Experience that directly relates to halls.  This is a grave omission and before any further changes are made to the warden service this wide ranging discussion of how halls fit into the student experience and then what sort of support we need to provide in that environment needs to take place.  To kick such a discussion off I offer my scheme for the out of hours service that was submitted and roundly rejected the last time we looked at the out of hours support service, attached, as a Google Document available to people inside of Brookes.

Okay, so now onto some more detailed issues with the course and the organisation I’d like to highlight.

Whilst I am quite sure that neither universities nor the government wants us to think in these terms, I cannot seem to shake the idea that for those students who from next year will be paying the best part of £9,000 a year for their course, that equates, roughly, to a hundred quid per module per week (9k ÷ 8 modules ÷ 11 weeks [we didn't have real lessons in any of my modules in week 12 this past semester]).  Or, since I have had two contact hours per week on each module so far, half a ton per hour.  Of course, fees cover a whole load more than just contact hours, but these are the core slices of your course, so you can reasonably roll all the other costs into these simple deliverable units of contact time.  So some of my modules with a couple of hundred students on them will be “raking in” £200k a semester.

For that price, no doubt, people will want (and be entitled to expect) things “just so”: well organised, consistent such that the same things are done the same way in each module, such as coursework hand-ins and returns, the use of the Virtual Learning Environment and so on.  And at the moment this is one of my biggest frustrations.  Some of these, of course, will fall to my day job in IT to help resolve anyway, but others involve the way colleagues work rather than the technology, and I think they need to try and harmonise all their administrative procedures where possible.

Firstly, as much administravia as possible should be done electronically.  If we can submit work through Turnitin why should we also spend money printing work out and hand delivering it to different pigeon holes, sometimes with cover sheets, sometimes with our names on, sometimes not.  There are plenty of tools now available to enable markers to annotate a PDF format document for example, then to submit their marking for moderation online and then to return the work with its mark and comments back electronically.  In fact, three of four modules used Turnitin, but even here it was inconsistent, with two of them making me log in to submit.ac.uk itself and another able to submit via our own VLE.  As a result it seems I can no longer access this latter piece of work via the Turnitin account portfolio I created for the other two.

Since half my modules are in Wheatley and half at Gipsy Lane a round trip of two hours to drop off course work or queue to get it back, often from offices that have specific opening hours, is just a waste of time, lovely though Wheatley Campus is!  All-electronic submission would obviate this and all-electronic marking would get us our results quicker and open up new ways of getting extra feedback as per the “assessment compact” – such as “click here to email the marker with more questions instead of having to find the time to make it to very restricted “office hours”.  Even when it is at Gipsy Lane it can be difficult.  On one module coursework was returned via a faculty resource room which is only open three hours each day – alternating between mornings and early afternoons – so for me, because their opening times were times I was in Wheatley on other modules or at work, it took a week to be able to fetch my marked coursework.  The first time I was able to make it to the resource centre during opening hours I found faculty management had decided to use the room for a meeting and didn’t want us in there collecting coursework!  It’s only open three hours a day, for us students: use another room or another time for meetings please!

Consistency of particularly electronic resources.  All our module handbooks were on the VLE this past semester, which I gather is good – some modules hardly use the VLE at all apparently.  So first, I’m not sure that I would want paper copies – I’ve not used them – and at the start of this semester there was an issue with printing some so we didn’t get them all until the second week.  We should be able to access these from before the start of each module if possible.  They contain reading lists and a preview of each week’s material to be covered.  There’s effectively a six week break between semester one and two – I’d like to use that for preparing for next semester (let alone telling people who might buy me books for Christmas what to get me!).  Ideally as soon as my module selections are made I’d want to see at least module handbooks, and preferably before I choose: the short description of a module is hardly enough to whet an appetite for it!

Module handbooks should have a consistent layout as well where possible.  If it has a weekly breakdown of lecture topics and background reading for them, it ought to be in the same place in each module’s handbook.  Same with coursework and assessment information – I often had to thumb back and forward in different handbooks to find the same sort of information in very different places.

But also they need to be available in a consistent format, ideally multiple formats.  Some (particularly notable for this was the microeconomics lecture slides) seemed to try and open in my browser (and destroyed any graphs in them at the same time!) when I wanted a download, others downloaded when I really just wanted to view them quickly in a browser.  We need to agree on a set of formats to be made available to support different devices and use them consistently.  I’m not clear why module handbooks are in an MS Word format – it’s the least portable and waiting for Word or Powerpoint to open to read them can be a pain – PDFs, maybe even MOBIs and EPUBs would be better.

I know, as an anarchist, you’d probably expect me to want to allow individual modules and their staff to do it how they pleased, but this is about my experience as a student, and inconsistencies are the main annoyance I’ve had this semester.

I’d like lectures at least to be audio, if not video, recorded, so that if I happen to miss one (I had flu one week for instance) or if I want to revisit them for revision I can do so easily from the VLE for that module.  I understand that there is much hand-wringing about intellectual property and recording lectures.  Judging by the wide range of materials and universities publishing a lot of their lectures “raw” on iTunesU however, including some of the global top flight universities, I’m sorry, but we ought to be able to do that as well, even if just for internal consumption accessible via our secure VLE accounts.

I know I mentioned seminars in my previous post, but I want to make a specific suggestion for those modules that feel they cannot have seminars every week: every third or fourth week is not enough and you can get little done in fifty minutes.  Maybe in these cases it might be better to have, say, two hours of lectures every week for half a semester (I confess I thought I would be getting two hours’ lecture AND one of seminar *every* week though to be honest!), then have one week where there’s a sort of symposium for three hours or half a day, in which, perhaps, seminar groups relate to each specific coursework essay option, where there’s a short plenary then break out groups that can spend a couple of hours exploring your preferred essay topic, then another plenary with feedback from each group so people who had initially chosen another topic might hear about the others enough to enable them to switch topics.  A similar thing could happen in the last teaching week (indeed I only had one module actually teach *anything at all* in week eleven even: all the rest were revision sessions – useful in themselves but definitely not to be counted as “teaching” in the sense of introducing new material).  I think such a thing might be a better way of recapping the subjects that have been covered in the previous four or five weeks and give a better springboard from which to embark on one’s chosen coursework option.

If this isn’t possible, I think for fifty nickers an hour I’d want to have a seminar every week, with a cap on the number of people in a seminar group of, say, ten.  Yes, timetabling might be more difficult, but since these seminars are currently next to useless, something has to be done to give value for money next year.

Finally for this post, since it involves resources, I personally would like as much as I can get in electronic form.  Text books in ten point font (apart from breaching RNIB guidelines anyway) on shiny paper, often with hard to read coloured sidebars, I have found a real pain.  At night in artificial light I have had to get a magnifying glass out to read the damned things.  Most of the core text books are only sold to universities and are updated frequently – if we cannot use our collective buying power to demand Kindle or other eBook formats there’s something wrong.

I know I’m getting a bit long in the tooth compared with most of my fellow students, and that I work full time as well as doing my course, but resolving the issue of having to traipse around various parts of Oxfordshire to hand in or fetch coursework and getting most books in a format I can read in different sized fonts depending on how I am feeling at the time would be, I am sure, useful to anyone who is studying on top of other commitments and has different reading needs in terms of access to resources in a format they can use without it being painful.  If we value diversity in the student body, these two are a must in my opinion.

I’d still stress though that overall I’ve really enjoyed the first semester.  The subject matter is fine, the teaching likewise.  I just want, even for what I am now paying let alone for what people will be paying next year for things to work the same.  I think that would be a “great leap forward” in student experience.  I’ve heard few complaints really about the course itself, but many grumbles about these apparently little issues.

In the next post I want to cover some of the support facilities associated with our faculties, and finally do a post on how halls of residence fit into the post-9k world.

So, twenty six years after I might have gone to university if I had been a good little boy at school, I was finally, on 20th September 2011, enrolled (matriculated at some universities) as a student!

My “subject” (as I think it is now called – it might be a programme, I can’t remember the different jargon!) is Economics, Politics and International Relations.  This means it is a Faculty of Business course (the economics bit remains compulsory for all three/four years) where half of my modules will be delivered by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (the politics or international relations modules, depending on which of the two you drop after year one).  It is a new “subject”: that’s partly why I applied, for it is sort of the first time that Brookes has come close to a “PPE” type course where both economics is compulsory and politics is a major part of it.  Nobody should be allowed to study politics without an economics component in my opinion – it makes for ignorant politicians when they try and play at allocating scarce resources on behalf of millions of their subjects!

We used to have a lot of “single field” subjects where you could combine two fields to put together some pretty eclectic degree combinations (a previous Deputy Vice-Chancellor always used to talk about “Accountancy and Mediaeval Dentistry” as an example – though we don’t, in fact, teach mediaeval dentistry so far as I am aware!).  But they are preferring to guide people into more structured “subjects” nowadays.  But my subject is important in several respects as regards the “Student Experience”:

• All first year modules are compulsory – most people have some choice over a couple of the eight modules they are expected to do in year one.
• We are a small “subject” cohort but all our modules are existing, standard modules from either the Economics department or the Social Sciences department.  In most cases the 26 of us are in modules of up to a couple of hundred who are likely to be on one of just two other subjects or fields.
• We get to see starkly any differences between the different faculties and departments over custom and practice.
• We are taught on two campuses a bus ride apart.
• The other “subjects” that fall under the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Business are wholly within the Faculty of Business so their module reviews and so on are carried out by the same group of people for the whole subject – in our case they are carried out by different Faculties for half of the course.

Induction week over then, I had my first module lecture at 9am on the first Monday morning of the semester.  Introduction to International Relations.

Oops – there was no microphone working for the module leader.  So she spent the first ten minutes wandering about campus looking for some IT help (I remained quiet at the back of the sweltering, somewhat smelly and really rather cramped main lecture theatre).  This is the first “complaint” if you will – what you, as lecturers, have to say is, for the most part, much more important than whether we can hear every word on the PA system or not.  The impression, for bright eyed freshers, was somewhat ruined by twiddling thumbs for ten or fifteen minutes in our first experience of academic life.  Technology fails.  Get used to it and learn to cope without it.  We can’t get those fifteen minutes back.  We can, I hope, access your lecture slides or notes to find out if we missed anything by not hearing your correctly.  Of course, it will be better when the technology doesn’t fail, but that, I think, is a way off yet.

Don’t worry – I’m not going to give you a run down of every lecture, but I think this first impression was not ideal so wanted to mention it particularly.

The first thing to notice, possibly, is the teaching hours.  I had thought, having seen the module descriptions in the module handbook, that we got two hours of lecture and one of seminar each week.  Others, who have just finished at Brookes, confirmed they thought this too.  But no – we had four modules and each one was a total of two hours “contact” time a week – either two hours of lectures, two hours of seminars or one hour of each.  Each module was different.  In the Politics and Internaitonal relations ones they had most weeks two hours’ worth of lectures with seminars only every alternate or even every third week.  In Microeconomics we got one hour of each, each week.  And in Skills for Economic Enquiry the whole thing was done in seminar groups of two hours each week.

Some fellow students I know felt that the seminars in Microeconomics were not very useful.  I think they missed the point of them.  There’s probably only so much new stuff you can take on board in a week, and an hour in a technical subject like that is probably enough for lectures.  The module sets exercises based on each week’s lecture content to be done outside of class and then reviewed in the seminar session after the following week’s lecture.  So it might seem a little infantilising apparently simply going over the proper solutions to those homework questions, but actually to me it provided a good time for making sure I had grasped the week’s concepts.  Maybe the mileage you feel you get out of these seminars is determined by whether you have done economics formally previously, such as at A Level, and so know a lot already that is covered in this introductory module.  But whether you have two hours of lectures or an hour each this is not going to change when there are some who have and some who haven’t studied the subject before.

The seminars I found really not worth the time were the ones in the two Social Sciences fields.  With Introduction to Politics we did at least have them alternate weeks, but they amount to 45-50 minutes by the time everyone has decanted from the lecture theatre to whatever cramped classroom has been assigned, they twenty five or so people in the group is too many to have meaningful discussions each time, and they are not frequent enough to get a real rapport going with your seminar leader.  By the time we had had four politics seminars we were down to eight people and then we could get a conversation going for forty minutes or so, but still, they didn’t add much to our knowledge I feel nor give quality contact time to ensure your seminar group was grasping all the concepts introduced in the lectures in between.

International Relations ones were even worse.  These were only every three, or four weeks, so there’s even less of an opportunity to build any rapport with the seminar leader.  In both cases at least one precious seminar hour was used up talking about how to cite sources for our first essay – I have ideas about this practice later to share, but basically I don’t think we need to do this twice or thrice in our case in one semester.

Early on in the semester there were rumblings of discontent over the fourth module, Skills for Economic Enquiry: that it was covering things most people already knew, that the activities were a little patronising and that there was too much “discuss in your groups” type activity.  Actually I quite enjoyed this module (even if I did get what I hope will be my lowest mark, in the first assignment, on this module).  I suspect that for people doing the Economics and Business subject combination it might appear more readily relevant as it’s only one of four economics and business modules you are doing.  For our course it was one of two and I suspect some people thought there were better things we could be learning in economics than all these pretty basic skills.  I reckon it will be more popular when people look back on it from a year’s distance or so when they are doing other and more complex economics modules.

Since this is getting to be almost as long as an Introduction to Politics essay, I think I shall save my main issues for another post.  But I shall just wind up on this one by saying that one thing I miss is a sense of cohort identity with my fellow students on Economics Politics and International Relations.  As I say above, we are a small subject group, and can easily get “lost” in modules with hundreds of others who do share more modules than we do and possibly have a bigger circle of fellow students on their bigger courses to get to know and work with.  From the beginning I asked if we could, for example, have an online area to ourselves as a course, perhaps on the VLE, where we could interact virtually for a bit of course solidarity.  Others’ mileage may vary on this, of course: I just think it’s important that we know who the others on our particular, specialised, course combination are and how to contact each other more easily.

So, having navigated the uncertain waters of applying and getting accepted, I had to get here.  Not literally of course, since I’ve been here all along, but the amount of information, instructions and bureaucracy that followed made me wonder how those who have just finished school, waited for their results, and then had to start moving away from home make it in one piece.

I recall tweeting at one point that I thought I might have a hypertensive stroke with all the stuff I had to complete, bring along, organise and so on.

With the university’s faculty reorganisation in full swing, new induction teams in the new faculties and departments were busy preparing hard copy and online materials to supply us with as much information as we could handle.  But this period, between March when I accepted my unconditional place and September when semester started was really quite sparse in terms of stuff from the university.

I had one letter from accommodation office which I could not tell to start with was from Brookes as the sheet on headed paper was the second page when I opened the envelope with no easy indication that this was anything other than an unsolicited offer of accommodation.  I had another from the disability support service asking me if I wanted to be on the lists of people they circulate to interested groups about students with disabilities.  And then not until mid-late August, when the “Applicant PIP” details with enrolment instructions were sent out did we hear much else.

Now again, it is likely different if you are a school pupil in the middle of your A Levels – you have better things to do still to ensure you get into your university of choice – than for me, but I really wanted as soon as possible to see details of the modules I’d be on, their reading lists, perhaps even get to meet, electronically, some of the others who would be on my course.  On a purely practical level, if I am going to be expected to spend lots of money on books or materials I would like to know that as soon as possible so I can persuade people to use birthdays and Christmases to buy me expensive books and so on, let alone give me a decent chance of reading them.  For many people they simply did not have access to this information before they actually got here and collected hard copies of module handbooks.

Sure, there is The Student Room with its plethora of forums and so on, but I am sure the university could capitalise on this desire of potential students for more information,  Perhaps it could convert likely “insurance” places into “firm” places or whatever the terminology is.

The induction Wiki had lots of good information, particularly about enrolment week itself, but no interaction: despite valiant attempts by Faculty of Business induction coordinators to enable it, the bizarre system sends us an ID and password which, until you actually arrive, only gives you access to the online enrolment facility and little else.  When you do arrive, you get a new student number and an account you can actually use on other university systems.

If our soon to be arrivals had access to more of our systems earlier, I hope they would interact with each other before they get here, and be more familiar with their new surroundings, their new colleagues and so on before they get here.  This really needs work, and maybe with the new Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle, that is so much of my job to get implemented at the moment, we could find a way of “releasing” accepted applicants onto various areas of Moodle so they can explore and discuss with people in their halls, with the Students Union, with their future classmates and academic advisers without resorting to outside facilities like TSR or even the UCAS YouGo! social network which seemed next to useless to me.

In the next instalment, I finally “arrive” and find out what I am supposed to be learning!

So, it’s basically a year since I got my heart set on doing a degree and applied.  In fact, it was on the occasion of last year’s office Christmas do that I asked my then department director to do me a reference.  I had promised to keep a sort of a diary noting my “student experience” as things progressed.  Now that my first semester is complete, I ought to record that experience.

The first thing to say is that the application process was not entirely straightforward, and not entirely suited to non-traditional applicants.  It had been a quarter of a century since I was last in formal education, so I certainly didn’t have any teachers who might vouch for me in my UCAS reference.  So I dropped a note to the admissions tutor for the faculties my course covered to ask if it ought to be an employer, or perhaps one of my many academic friends who could vouch for my keenness and aptitude better than, say, a line manager.  But no, it had to be an employer.

Now that’s okay when you work for the university for which you are applying and your boss is the academically respected university librarian, and Helen clearly did a fantastic job of her reference as it got me a place.  But imagine for a second asking a boss at a struggling private sector firm in an economic downturn, ten months before you might want to arrange time off to study: “Of course you can have a reference, but maybe you’d prefer to leave next week to prepare for university if you don’t see your long term future with us.”

Similarly with waiting for a decision.  I think it took eight weeks for a decision in my case.  Now that again is probably not too bad if you are a sixth former in a school where everyone is waiting for the same news and will be in education right until two months before they pack their bags for university.  But again, if you are a mature student, planning on transforming your life in a big way in nine month’s time to study, two months seems like a long time out of that planning period to have to wait to hear.  Again, fortunately for me living and working at the university this was no more than a little niggle, and not helped by the imposition at the same time of our OBIS restructuring which made everything a little more uncertain, but for others planning a big change this delay could be important.

So anyway, once I had had and responded to the decision, the next step was to work out whether I actually wanted to go part time (or apply for my new job as part time in my case owing to the restructure).  I just so happened, a short while before my interview for the new job, to look into what sort of student loan financing I might get if I wanted and whether it would allow me to go part time.  It was purely fortuitous that I tried before the end of May as the Student Loan Company said that it wanted applications by then, but I don’t ever remember having been told that, so it was just lucky that I looked when I did.

I had been led to believe the SLC was bureaucratic and inefficient and so, largely, did it prove to be, though not half as bad as the worst nightmare stories I’d heard.  Commercial banks can have money from loan applications in your account in fifteen minutes.  SLC wants four months to be “sure” of getting you the money before you need it at the beginning of the new academic year.  I had trouble because their website is not clear about what evidence you do and don’t need to send (again especially if you are a mature student basing everything on your own, rather than parents’ or partner’s incomes).

By the August Bank Holiday I still had not heard, then discovered they were waiting for my Birth Certificate (why, when your UCAS form has your NI number on it I don’t understand).  Suffice to say that a 44 year old birth certificate is often difficult to find.  Last time I saw it was when I started work here and it was wanted for my membership of the pension scheme.  Fortunately one area of government that seems quite efficient is the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages who got a copy of my certificate, at a cost, to me, next day.  But I still had to send it twice to SLC since they deemed the accompanying form wrong the first time (without explaining what was actually wrong with it).  Still, once that was solved, the money was quick to flow, so not half as bad as those I had heard about not getting their loans till the May after they had started and so on.

Anyway, not an entirely smooth ride, made easier for me as an employee of the university already, but a few bits and pieces perhaps worth considering about application processes and so on.  In my next post I want to look at the “post acceptance” interactions with the university before actually stepping into a lecture theatre

One thing I am setting out to try and achieve in my studies is to get through as much of my degree as possible without producing or consuming paper.  Not out of any particular environmental concern (though not using scarce resources, for an economics student at least, must surely be a positive!) but just because in many situations electronic is now better than paper.

Unfortunately at the beginning of each module, and at various stages along the way, lecturers tend to hand out paper by the truck load, whether it be module handbooks, weekly lesson plans or question sheets for seminar work.  They also demand, generally, two paper copies of coursework, as well as one copy submitted electronically via TurnItIn, the anti-plagiarism system.

But apart from that, how well am I doing?  Well, I have two key gadgets – my iPad and my Kindle.  Sadly, most of the actual text books I need are only available in dead tree versions.  However much of the background reading is available in Kindle form.  But even with that, of the 26 books originally in my reading list before starting on the course, only ten were available on Kindle or, indeed, in any electronic format.

Brookes uses a Virtual Learning Environment called WebCT – though it will be one of my main jobs at work to move us to Moodle, linked to severa electronic resource databases like Equella and Mahara over the course of the next year.  But for now, most of the paper handed out in lectures and seminars is posted on the VLE as well.  File formats raise some issues: most are posted as MS Word documents.  I would certainly prefer PDFs, mainly because first, Word is a great big piece of bloatware that takes ages to open each time I want to refer to something and second, they are editable which I suspect is overall a recipe for some shenanigans later (maybe someone could claim the coursework deadline was different in their copy and so on).

I have worked out that if I open the Word versions, and, on my Mac at least, use the printing function to email a PDF to my kindle.com address, I can get a reasonable quality of handbook etc onto my Kindle.  Some format better than others, so I ought to try and work out what works best and recommend module staff to use those techniques.  Also, if a lecturer posts a link to a web page for background reading, I have discovered I can send it to Instapaper and set up my Instapaper account to send a daily digest to my kindle.com address as well.  This is great for general use to – effectively you can create your own daily newspaper from your RSS reader, say, and have it offline on your Kindle to enjoy at your leisure.

However, it’s in note taking that the gadgets score.  Instead of the ubiquitous A4 block pad, I tend to use a mind mapping program called iThoughts on my iPad to take notes.  This, I think, is far and away better than paper.  My typing is way more legible than handwriting at speed, and more especially, I can reoganise each note wherever is most appropriate on the mind map.  If there is Wifi in the lecture or classroom I tend to upload my maps to my XMind account before I leave so it’s instantly available on any other device I want to review them on later (or, since I have for now uploaded them as public mind maps, to anyone else who stumbles across that account – if staff or the university would rather I did not do that, then let me know and I will change to making them private maps).

Studying economics, though, there are lots of occasions on which I need to do little graphs – you know, supply and demand curves and so on.  So at the weekend I found a couple of pretty good apps for the iPad, thanks to this little guide.  First, OmniGraphSketcer for iPad is a freehand tool for quickly drawing exactly the sort of stuff that economists like to bamboozle the rest of us with.  I’ve used other OmniGroup products before, and it is true that this is, as apps go, quite an expensive one at ten quid, but it has already proven its worth just today in a seminar group.  Then, in readiness for having to do some more complicated maths, I picked up PocketCAS Pro for iPad which solves and graphs quite complex equations.

So, so far so good.  What would help to make all this more feasible then?

Well first, universities ought to use their economic clout in recommending text books to pressure publishers to make more of them available in e-formats.  Not only are economics and politics texts books rather expensive at anywhere between about £30 and £50, but they all weigh a ton.  The more I can get into my 350g Kindle the better.  Economics and politics are popular subjects – most of my modules have at least 150 and often 250 attendees.  Repeat that across the sector (many of the books are pretty standard) and that’s a lot of buying power that could be brought to bear by academics, and many have regular new editions.  There should be no excuse for any new edition these days not to have an e-format version.  The sooner we get e-Textbooks available in the UK the better.  And the ultimate sanction ought to be to switch to using so called Open Learning Resources wherever possible.

Second, there could be more focus on consistency and choice in the format of electronic resources generated by the university.  PDFs of module handbooks, past exam papers, seminar handouts and so on should be mandatory.  Better still, the repository such things are stored in could handle conversion to several different standard formats and the individual could perhaps set their preferences in the VLE to default to a PDF, or a .mobi or a Word document or whatever the individual wants.

And third, if we have to submit work electronically, why bother with paper versions?  Let’s start marking the electronic copies, and if academics cannot manage that, then they, not the students, can arrange to print them (and maybe to scan in marked and annotated versions for sending back to students).  On most e-reading devices you can write notes – I have PDF Expert and iAnnotate for the iPad for example to allow me to annotate PDFs and of course you can write margin notes on the Kindle too.

Finally, I would like to be able to post or annotate online resources for others to use.  Social bookmarking is an essential part of a VLE nowadays.  And I hope to be able to build that in to our implementation of Moodle for next year.

But, does any of this matter I wonder?  Last week, in my Skills for Economic Enquiry class the market we had to comment on was “e-Reader” devices.  It certainly seemed that of the thirty or so people in my seminar group I was the only one to have one.  So may be all this is still a rarity.  I hope it becomes more mainstream though.

It has come as little surprise to me, given my prediction in December last year, that so many universities have chosen to charge the highest allowed fees of £9,000 a year under the government’s bugger’s muddle of an Higher Education funding system.  So for another little prediction – either the system will not see its way to implementation in the current form, or, if it does, it will have to be reviewed within a couple of years.  In other words, it’s not even going to be as stable as Dearing.

But, assuming it does come into effect, and assuming it, or something similar (perhaps without a cap at all) remains for the foreseeable future what can be done?  There has, after all, been much discussion about the notion that Higher Education is a “bubble” about to burst, particularly in the US, where student loan debt now outstrips the aggregate total balance of credit card debt.

If you look around the American Higher Education scene, many of those institutions that were around in the depression have student housing co-operatives, credit unions and so on attached.  These arose as a mutual self-help response to the challenges of funding Higher Education in the Depression, and perhaps they point the way to a possible future for helping fund UK students through what will now be a significantly higher investment in themselves than previously.

There are, indeed, all sorts of possible answers.  In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman posited the idea of selling shares in yourself in return for investment, with the idea that you would slowly buy back the shares as your income grew as a result of the investment.  This idea is taken to extremes in the recent “libertarian” science fiction books The Unincorporated Man and the Unincorporated War.

Friedman has a more fundamental point that the government’s proposed system does not take into account, and without which it will inevitably create more perverse incentives.  Because, in our case, student funding will come from the government up front, it is not competing with investment in other kinds of capital.  The normal way of telling whether an investment is worth making is its predicted rate of return against better or worse competing potential returns from other investments you might make with it.

But, since they’ve messed around with the graduate contribution terms so it does not look like any normal kind of a loan, and since the money is, if you will, a separate pot that cannot be used for alternative investments, these signals will not be apparent.  And that lack, at least as much as the general current lack of low cost competition for universities, means there are no real signals as to whether individual institutions have got their prices right from the perspective of the customer.

Anyhow, one thing we could do is look to find ways of bypassing the new state backed financing system.  Now sure, in the US, one of the big problems about student loan debt is that big chunks of it is borrowed from distinctly dodgy lenders; preying on the bubble mentality of people desperate to get a degree in case they lose out for the rest of their lives, some of these are more akin to loan sharks or sub-prime mortgage providers than investors in peoples’ futures.  And this points back to the mutual institutions established to help people get through higher education in the Depression, the university credit unions.

I did actually propose this idea a decade ago now, as a way of enticing and retaining graduates’ financial involvement in the university.  Accepting that not many alumni are capable or willing to make large monetary donations, I wondered if they could be enticed into putting some of their savings into a university credit union, earning interest, whilst at the same time assisting subsequent students with low cost financial aid.

In the intervening years I’ve been introduced to different possible mechanisms, such as the JAK Members Bank in Sweden, and the idea of using Open Capital Partnerships as a less “toxic” equivalent of Friedman’s incorporation idea mentioned above.  Here in Oxford, a small city with two large higher education institutions in many ways dominating the local economy we could fold these ideas into a local currency as well – after all, I’ll bet between the two universities here we spend a significant mount of money purely within the local economy.  Perhaps some of the money from student fees could provide the “value backing” for such a complementary currency.

With the JAK (pronounced, appropriately, “Jock” with a sort of a “J/Y” thing going on) system, you would expect incoming students to have saved a little bit of money in the system being run by their chosen university (or perhaps a bigger one covering several universities), they then apply to borrow sufficient to pay their fees, their living costs, or whatever part of it they want to do this way.  All the while they pay a membership subscription, but once they graduate and are earning they start to “save” again within the scheme, eventually wiping out their debt and having a positive balance which within the system is used for new borrowers (or, after a stipulated time, for them to withdraw and end their relationship with the system).  It is interest free, but the membership fees and the lack of interest on positive balances do represent a sort of hidden opportunity cost.  So the JAK system is roughly a credit union with fees rather than interest.

The Open Capital Partnership would be more akin to Friedman’s idea of investing in individuals as shareholders in an incorporated business.  Except that using a limited liability partnership type structure you can remove the notion of an investor “owning” the “investee” and instead think of it more as the investor having a stake in the additional “profit” (i.e. income) after graduation the student makes until they buy out the investor partner.  I think this one is the more attractive solution, both for investors and investees, as investors do get a positive return whilst investees get potentially a greater say in how and when they buy their investor out.

I would do the math at this stage, to see how it works out against the government proposed system, but that would be to give the entire game away.  If you like the idea and want help working it out, I shall do a bit more work on it.  But for now, it’s just an idea, a vague notion.

Way back in oh I don’t know when, I suggested that there was a strong case for universities becoming hubs of social enterprise and the Big Society for their local hinterlands.  Now I see the government has caught up, sort of, suggesting that there might be a “big society university” (though why just one I have no idea – a “really big society university” perhaps rather than local ones.  First again!  Feel free to call i you want any advice Cam!