tim's experiment

Hong Kong universities are surprisingly traditional places. I suspect this is largely down to lack of self-confidence. Even the most prestigious local establishments suspect that they are too small, or too young, to be taken seriously. So they try to copy overseas examples, usually American. The problem with this is that we are clinging to a model which is dying.

Simplifying furiously we can say that there are two models of what being a university student involves. One has the students attending lecturers, the other has him or her attending tutorials on a one-to-one basis, or something close to it. Lectures, it seems, are now undergoing the process which killed a lot of live music when the gramophone was invented. In the old days the student could  only attend the lectures at his own university. The lecturer, consequently, did not really face any competition. He was stuck with his students, and they were stuck with him. This is no longer the case. MIT has put all its lectures on the web. Whole on-line universities have sprung up offering numerous courses, often free (you pay to take the exam). Our lecturer now faces hundreds of competitors for student attention. Indeed, like an opera singer, he now has to compete with people who are dead but recorded. Somewhere in the BBC archives are many hours of AJP Taylor lecturing on history. Where will we find such wit and learning today?

Exploring this issue the other week, The Economist’s correspondent noted with some surprise that the two oldest English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, both expressed complete indifference to the ominous trend. But they would, wouldn’t they, because they do not depend on the lecture system. No amount of technical agility will allow a teacher to have a face-to-face conversation with 100 students simultaneously. The essence of such a conversation is that there are two of you in the same room, breathing the same air, making eye contact and so on. The person giving a lecture can, like a stud bull, use technical help to sow his seeds broadly. A tutorial by technology ceases to be a tutorial. When I was a student (at Oxford) it was clearly understood that lectures were optional. You attended courses which were particularly interesting to you. Attendances, especially after the first week or two when many customers came to sample the goods on offer, were low. This did not bother anyone. Quality was of more interest: people who were doing ground-breaking work not available elsewhere would attract a discerning crowd, often including graduate students and fellow teachers. People who were merely reading the textbook they had published two years ago addressed a largely empty room.

In local universities we do not have this system. Attendance at lectures is generally compulsory. Well you can make attendance compulsory, but not attention. Students doze, send text messages, listen to iPods, read the book which has all the information in it which you are painfully presenting through a piece of mediaeval technology … This is not entirely surprising because speaking to a large crowd requires either consummate natural talent or extended training, and most academics have neither. Their research-besotted value system, which requires them to spend as much time as they can on research and as little as they can get away with on teaching, leaves little hope of improvement. Most lectures, actually, are crap. The system is overdue for the scrapheap.

The usual reason given for persevering with it is that the alternative is so expensive. This is a legend carefully fostered by the old-fashioned collegiate universities because it gives them an excuse for extracting more money from their government or their students. Actually it is not true. I heard it so often that I believed it, until I stumbled across a way of working out the consequences of abandoning lectures and having tutorials instead. The problem was that the university in which I was working published a staff-student ratio, but it was obvious to all of us that this was not actually the average size of the classes we were teaching. So I was looking for a way of connecting the number of staff and students in three departments with an actual average class size. Rather surprisingly this came down to a quite simple formula, in which the decisive ingredients were the number of contact hours required of students a week, and the  number of teaching hours required of staff. Just for fun I tried replacing the then customary 18 class hours a week with one, to represent a single tutorial. Assuming the average number of people in a tutorial was two – quite reasonable in my experience – we could have managed this with a staff workload of 12 tutorials a week. Most people would be quite happy to swap 12 hours of leisurely personal encounters for xix hours of mass teaching with its attendant preparation and grading. And many of us were teaching 12 hours a week anyway.

So actually we could have any system that we want. But I do not expect anything to change. Academics are disappointingly routine thinkers outside their own subject areas (and sometimes inside them as well). Extended deliberation on reform usually comes to the conclusion that we should offer what the most senior administrator present got when he was an undergraduate. So tradition marches on. As the late Chairman Mao said in one of his rare lucid moments, conservative things do not fall over unless they are pushed.