That’s Edutainment

Hopefully you will agree that this is a particularly engaging addition of Bioscience Education with a focus on the many faces of active learning. I will set the tone with an article that I recently encountered whilst searching the term ‘edutainment’. The newspaper article was written by a lecturer in education at King’s College in 1996 and described how museums engaged with the public (www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/thats-edutainment-1363993.html). As well as pointing out that the term ‘edutainment’ was first used coined to describe electronic media (including computer games and educational CD-Roms), the article focused on the debate around the philosophies of museums and how they engaged with the public. At the time there was a spotlight on using theme park approaches to provide a balance of education and fun in the context of “sacrificing learning to make exhibits palatable to an ever more demanding public”. The experience was reported as operating on two different axes, underlining the importance of firstly being educated, but also having fun at the same time.

As a researcher of the UK’s student satisfaction survey (for a brief summary see; Langan 2011), I felt that this article captured elements of current debates about university education and the role in decision-making of student satisfaction ratings. The (then) Head of Education at the Natural History Museum described science education in museums as a “process of inquiry rather than the receipt of knowledge… [aiming to] stimulate people’s interest, to capture their imaginations, so that they find out what it is they want to know more about”. He asserted that (in his arenas) “You can’t really create an educational experience that you don’t enjoy. A museum that was totally inaccessible and had no visitors would have no justification… [we want] to contribute to a culture of learning, of learning how to learn rather than simply to present information. Asking informed questions is, perhaps, the hallmark of education”. These thoughts reignited the debate for me of ‘what students want’ and ‘what they need’.

Is edutainment an aspect of the lives of university educators? Should it be? Is it a dirty word whispered in contempt of traditional approaches that implies a dumbing-down of content, whilst glamorising the superficial? I have no doubt that the current blend of satisfying customers and developing learners can be complex. It is well established that the effect of ‘like me, like my class’ occurs in teaching and that individual teachers have considerable effects on the experiences of those learning, beyond that of the course content. It is worth noting that students are able to differentiate between tutors they like and those that they know challenge/stretch them (Marsh 1987). The work of educational psychologist Professor Herb Marsh is some of the most widely cited that I have encountered in this area (e.g. using his SEEQ evaluations). Herb provides compelling evidence of the extent that teachers are at the heart of perceptions of the course overall. An example presented at a recent HEA Surveys Conference in May 2011 was the “teacher-effect”, which resulted from showing that student ratings of their education they received reflected much more strongly the teacher rather than the course itself (one analysis implied the course was almost entirely independent of the student evaluations) (www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/EvidenceNet/Students_evaluations_of_university_teaching.pdf). If you want oversimplification; good teachers = good course feedback, but there is much more to it (as always).

I suggest that the implications of Herb’s work (and the many other researchers in this area) are yet to be realised in the race to enhance student satisfaction metrics. For example, my own research does not account for individual teachers in the models to predict the factors most associated with the NSS item rating ‘Overall Satisfaction’. It drives me to suggest that we need other programme level measures for our courses that include questions about pedagogy, learner engagement and learning activities. Those of you familiar with the American NSSE questionnaire (http://nsse.iub.edu/) will have seen examples of this. The NSSE is being adopted voluntarily by many institutions across the US. If you get chance, have a glance at the types of questions asked in the NSSE and consider how these may be valuable to decision-makers, particularly when compared to the satisfaction responses of the UK’s NSS.

Clearly, individual educators influence strongly a personal journey of learning that marries preconceptions and experiences. There is clear potential to both; better celebrate success in L&T in universities, and also generate learning designs that go far beyond the superficial whilst still engaging our students/audiences/customers (delete as appropriate). I am beginning to see some evidence of rewards for the time, innovation and energy needed to get this balance right. This would be further enhanced if our own research into our learning systems (in our subject areas) was valued more highly.

This volume of Bioscience Education presents several key pieces of the learner-experience jigsaw. We begin with Steve Maw and co-workers’ review of the current status of field work in the biosciences report on the field work survey that many of us participated in. I wonder how these patterns will change from 2012 and how future funding structures will impact upon field work provision. This article provides an important benchmark for future comparisons and links well to the ‘tutor-student gap’ that we all experience in different ways and can potentially be narrowed during residential work, a concept explored further by Adam Hart and colleagues.

Maria Chamberlain picks up the debate around active learning and project work and neatly documents staff and student responses and links to a suite of adaptable resources. Another active and field-based communication is provided by Sean Rands who uses observations of grazing animals as an example of how to help students make their own mistakes in project work. This is an exercise I am already adapting for use on my own field courses. Effective learning experiences for bioscientists are often further enhanced by developing an ability to communicate subject knowledge externally. Kay Yeoman and her team report on how communication skills are embedded into their curriculum with a useful documentation of associated skill developments within and beyond their courses. There are further subject specific examples of well-seasoned explorations of exercises from Beronda Montgomery revealing her genetics-based laboratory exercises and also it is well worth ‘stumbling across’ Vicky Chester’s exciting clinical gait studies article regardless of your subject discipline, due to its broader underlying messages to engage and educate bioscience students. Another pertinent article by Chiavaroli and Familiari provides a well reasoned argument for the use of discriminate analyses for enhancing the use of multiple choice questions.

I complete my introduction by focusing on an article that has caused recent debate for me. Sinead Drea’s essay in some ways revisits the ‘what students want’ or, what they don’t want in this case by documenting the last student enrolled on a Botany degree in the UK. This is a timely example of the nature of student course choice, catalysing wider debate about the intellectual property of the nation and even the purposes of Higher Education per se. I can’t help wonder that if there was a trendy TV series with botanists (maybe a bit like CSI), that botany degrees may not be in such a position. Dare I suggest ‘Randalia and Hopkirkia (deseeded)’ or ‘Sphagnum P.I.’? Thanks to Chippy and Edd for those mildly entertaining suggestions.

It is difficult not to make comment on the current landscape in H.E. This volume of Bioscience Education launches in the wake of a vote of no confidence in the Universities Minister David Willetts (www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/07/oxford-university-no-confidence-vote) and also debate around a new ‘private college’ in London with higher fees (www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13676006). All this at a time of growing encouragement for commercial providers to compete for educational provision in the UK. This adds to the ‘interspecific’ competition within H.E., which already includes international universities (e.g. Harvard and M.I.T.) who are developing ever-greater online presence and resource bases in an era where more than two thirds of American HEIs offer online courses in some form. To what extent the ‘£9000 fees generation’ will be influenced by this competition is unclear. Some insight may be indicated by changes in the demographics of the Open University to younger, more international cohorts (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12766562). Competition can be costly and with terms such as ‘funding gaps’ and ‘financial health of institutions’ a matter of general conversation I wait with bated breath this new generation of learners. Of course when the student is enrolled and paid up, it is another challenge to satisfy their expectations.

I welcome responses to the editorials which may be published as Letters to the Editor or sent as general comment (email: [email protected]).