Harvard introduces teaching reforms

Harvard, the world's richest university, wants to improve its undergraduate teaching. Like other Ivy League universities in the United States, Harvard charges more than $30,000 (£15,000) a year in tuition but its academics concentrate on research rather than teaching because it confers status.

According to a 2005 survey, Harvard students are less satisfied with their education than students at other top universities in the US. Problems lie with staff availability and the quality of instruction.

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"Too large a fraction of our teaching is in the hands of graduate students," the former Harvard president Larry Summers said. "Too much of it takes place in large lectures, where faculty members don't know students' names. And too little involves active learning, whether it's in a laboratory, a debate in a class, or a seminar dialogue."

Last year, Harvard set up a task force to investigate. A subsequent report recommended big changes, including paying academics more for good teaching and encouraging them to sit in on one another's classes. Whether these changes will happen is questionable, according to insiders. In such a conservative institution, it will require a lot of commitment.

Harvard's academics are still expected to place a lot of emphasis on research, but there is now hope that more attention will be paid to teaching.

"Some of us would say that Harvard is late in this game," says Professor Roger Brown, the vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University. "That it is waking up to the fact that students are being short-changed is significant.

"If somewhere this prestigious feels that it has to do something to redress the balance, perhaps there is a lesson for our research-intensive universities."

The Harvard reforms were described at a recent conference organised by the Southampton universities, as well as the Economic and Social Research Council, the Higher Education Academy, and the Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. This was the second such conference on the fraught subject of teaching versus research. Academics from all over the world - Australia, Canada, Africa, New Zealand, the US and Germany - were present, suggesting that this a major issue internationally. "There is increasing recognition that, generally speaking, inquiry-based learning can be very beneficial," Brown says. "To create these conditions and work against the academic grain is tough."

Similar charges to those levelled against Harvard are made against research-intensive universities in the United Kingdom - but things are changing in the system as a whole. In new universities, such as Coventry, greater efforts have been made to engage students' interests by getting them to explore subjects for themselves rather than inculcate learning through the more traditional lectures and seminars.

Although you could argue that an exploratory approach to learning dates from the Greek thinker Socrates, the new interest in the subject goes back about 20 years and is a response to the gap that has opened up between teaching and research in universities, with the two being funded separately, and with some universities gaining much more money from research than others.

This means that academics have more incentive to concentrate on research; if they are successful, the rewards are considerable. Not only do they enhance their status but they also bring in money for their university. The result is that teaching has even less allure than previously. At a time when the student population has grown without a corresponding increase in resources, teaching becomes a Cinderella. Students are taught in larger and larger groups, often by postgraduates, and receive little personal attention.

Inquiry-based learning puts the students, not the teachers, in the driving seat by allowing students to learn by undertaking research. "We're putting the learners first and teachers are there to help," says Professor Lewis Elton, visiting professor at Manchester University.

Some argue that this approach can be introduced throughout the curriculum and from the first year onwards. Others, like Elton, are doubtful that you can put 18-year-olds into research. Certainly, it is embedded more in some subjects than in others. It has been adopted in medicine as part of the new problem-based approach to teaching the subject, and it is also widely used in engineering.

Academics such as Professor Mick Healey, director of the Centre for Active Learning at the University of Gloucestershire, believe that inquiry-based learning should be used in conjunction with other teaching methods, including lectures, seminars and practical work.

"Programmes that are over-dependent on lectures or inquiry-based learning do not cater for the full range of learning styles." He believes that the approach can be used in all three years of an undergraduate degree. "Inquiry-based learning is an ideal approach to develop students' study skills in their first term.

"In the first year, you give students more support and you tailor the projects carefully to what they are able to do," he says. "In the final year, you can ask students to do longer, more open-ended projects in groups and undertake research-based dissertations."

Healey adds: "One of the best ways to link research and teaching is to involve the students in doing research themselves."

All the signs show that the issue is moving up the agenda. According to Liz Beaty, director of learning and teaching at the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce), "There is a little bit of a sea change."

Most universities have professional training courses for staff. The Higher Education Academy, responsible for improving learning in universities, has set up networks and established a national teaching fellow scheme.

And Hefce has been putting money into boosting research-informed teaching in new universities and centres for excellence in teaching. "We're closer to being able to say that we have in place incentives for good teaching," Beaty says.

It's a modest statement but a sign of progress, just as the Harvard reform represents the beginning of real change in America's oldest university.

"It teaches you to use your initiative'

Stephanie Harley, 21, is in her fourth year studying medicine at Peninsula Medical School, University of Plymouth.

"Plymouth was one of the first medical schools to introduce problem-based learning," she says. "Every two weeks we're given a case study of an illness to work on in small groups, so you start with the patient and work back through the causes. It's been amazing. You start with a problem and, as you solve it, you learn about the symptoms and processes. It's good because it makes everything more interesting and grounded in the real world. It works well for this subject, because in medicine you have to keep learning and teaching yourself new things. Those who prefer being taught through lectures shouldn't do this course - it teaches you to use your initiative rather than memorising things. In medicine it's important to learn this early on, but I don't think it would work as well for other subjects."

CHRIS GREEN