Is a European initiative on teaching and learning needed?

A European initiative on teaching enhancement in higher education would be of added value in countries that have no existing national initiative, whether because it has not been developed or due to the limited capacity and size of the higher education system.

But it would not be realistic to expect one European initiative to cater to the diverse needs and demands of the entire European higher education sector. Therefore, several alternative models should be considered.

This is the conclusion of a feasibility report produced by the European Forum for Enhanced Collaboration in Teaching (EFFECT) project* for the European University Association. The project set out to explore how pedagogical staff development and learning and teaching developments in general could be enhanced and supported through European-level action.

The report was presented at the European Learning and Teaching Forum at the University of Warsaw in Poland on 14-15 February.

The report said the alternative initiatives would seek to synergise and collaborate with already existing national and institutional initiatives, facilitating exchange and collaboration among them, and enabling a European dimension in teaching enhancement similar to other areas of collaboration established either at European policy levels or among institutions in the European Higher Education Area.

The models considered in the report include structured peer learning opportunities, a network of institutional centres for learning and teaching, collaborative staff development programmes offered by university consortia and an institutional evaluation approach.

“While teaching enhancement may offer some kind of certification, it should not emphasise this aspect too strongly, as this may negatively affect voluntary participation, and impede truly explorative exchange and collaboration, as currently practised in some of the networks,” the report said.

In addition, teachers from countries where certified courses are commonly implemented (such as Finland, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom) or from systems with a national regulation on teaching enhancement (Denmark, France, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway) are unlikely to find added value in undergoing more of such courses.

Development opportunities valued

However, their participation across a broad range of existing European initiatives proves that they regard uncertified development opportunities as highly valuable.

Lack of funding and lack of recognition are seen as the biggest obstacles to enhancement of teaching and learning.

“Teaching needs to be recognised as a core component of academic careers and academics’ professional identity. Recognition for teaching also needs to come from national (legislation or policy) and institutional frameworks,” the report says.

A further question is how to ensure the sustainability of a structure that should be owned and governed by the sector. A business model should include:

• • Income-generation (the structure would become a service provider).
  
  
• • Membership fees from individual members, institutions or governments.
  
  
• • Grants provided by public funding and other donors.
  
  
• • A combination of these.

Currently most European higher education institutions offer their own teaching enhancement opportunities and engage in cooperation with partner institutions or participate in European or international fora on the issue.

Although this allows for a more tailor-made approach, it may forgo opportunities to establish good practice and lessons learned in other institutions and systems and may not gain recognition outside the institution, the report warns.

Unpredictable change

The report also warned that higher education is changing in ways that are not easy to predict. This is particularly true of technological changes that may lead to transformation, such as massive open online courses, hologram teaching, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

In addition, research and professional knowledge are developed and shared differently, for instance via connecting and learning from each other, or in local or global learning communities.

“This may result in deeper and more disruptive developments that impact learning and teaching, the daily practice of students and staff, and the ways in which higher education institutions operate,” the report says.

Anticipation and response could therefore become a task of teaching enhancement, and this would also enable a shift in focus away from deficit-based professional development in teaching, and towards “more holistic, adaptive and reflective continuous professional learning for teachers”.

“This would support a concept of teaching enhancement that goes beyond the provision of teaching skills training and should likely not even be referred to as teaching enhancement, but as academic staff development. This might also be a way to address the lack of recognition that teaching is facing,” the report says.

No pedagogical training requirement

Michael Gaebel, director of higher education policy at the European University Association (EUA), told University World News that when the whole discussion on teaching and learning started to grow – and also due to digitalisation pressure on universities – there was a strong emphasis on pedagogical skills.

“In most countries it is enough to have a PhD to teach without any requirement to have pedagogical training. But we could see the issue was not just about pedagogical staff enhancement but much broader – institutions seeing more and more a need to develop strategic approaches to teaching and learning.”

The lack of recognition of the value of teaching enhancement is part of the problem, he says.

“We came out last year out with a trend study and one of the results was that university leaders in 43 European countries – from Finland to Malta and from Ireland to Kazakhstan – ¬agree that teaching is not valued as much as research and this has a negative impact on the development of learning and teaching.”

Yet research and teaching go together – and in most countries academics are expected to do both – since research is “not just about research but also the ability to teach the results of your research”, he says.

So staff development is needed and in some of the countries that is happening, whether via collaboration between the sector and the ministry or via institutional partnerships or networks of institutions.

Very few systems offer financial incentives to undergo the staff development, he says. But that might anyway not be the best way to drive change. “I think it is more about providing better recognition and encouraging people to participate and value it.

“At the same time there is clear feeling that what really counts for career development is research and not teaching, so the question is: Can this be addressed and can we achieve a better balance between the way we value research performance and recognise the contribution that staff make to teaching?”

He thinks the way forward for European initiatives is to build on the initiatives that are already in place. The EUA has been running a teaching enhancement forum for a couple of years, for instance, in which small peer learning groups of vice-rectors work on a topic and share experience and ideas.

*EFFECT is an Erasmus+-funded project developed by a consortium of 12 partners coordinated by the European University Association. The consortium brought together major European stakeholder organisations (such as the European Students’ Union and the European Trade Union Committee for Education), specialised university networks (such as the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities), national organisations representing higher education institutions (the rectors’ conferences from Germany, Hungary, Ireland and Poland), individual universities, as well as professional organisations specialised in teaching enhancement (the former Higher Education Academy, now Advance HE).