Partially Ordered Thoughts

See also Part I and Part II.

I’m off to Girona (or Gerona), Spain, this afternoon for a quick holiday on Ryanair (I’ve measured, re-measured, weighed, and re-weighed my carry-on so many times I can’t believe it), so there will be a break of a couple days in these posts. However, I have a bit of time before I head to St. Pancras to catch my train to Luton, so let’s explore repayment of tuition fees in the new English higher education financing scheme. Read more »

Be sure to start with Part I.

In this post, I’d like to try to describe how I as an American understand the changes to the funding model for higher education in the UK. I’m going to try to be as accurate as I can be, but undoubtedly there will be things that I muddle because of something subtle that I don’t realize I don’t understand. Hopefully people will correct me if that happens or ask questions if something isn’t clear. I don’t know that I’ll do any worse job than some members of the media or some politicians, as I keep getting the feeling that they don’t know what’s going on when it comes to HE funding either. I did spend a couple hours listening to the House of Lords debate the changes last night, and it was nice to hear the perspective of some lords who have been leaders of English universities speak. I was pleased to hear that I shared most of their opinions on the matter, so I must not be completely misunderstanding things.

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I’ve been meaning to write about my experiences here in the UK as the coalition government that came to power in May has worked toward shifting the cost of higher education from the taxpayers to those who attend university in England. I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t had time to sit down and get my thoughts into organized form. Today, however, is the second day my office has been without heat, so I’m sitting in my flat and having a hard time focusing on research. Seems like the perfect opportunity to share some thoughts on the changes from an American perspective. Let’s begin with why on earth you might want to read the thoughts of a postdoc who’s been in the UK for less than three months. Admittedly I haven’t done a great job on keeping up on the media in the US, but I have tried to stay on top of my usual higher education news sources. Seems like they’ve given the matter only cursory coverage or the coverage was syndicated from Times Higher Education. (Or the coverage was sensationalized and centered around the student protests once a car carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.) I will say, THE is great! I added them to my HE news feeds. However, they write for a UK audience from the UK perspective. It’s taken me as an American over here actively working with people at universities a while to get a grip on what’s going on, so I don’t have any idea what reading such articles is like for Americans in HE who are not familiar with the English system. This is my attempt to bring my experiences in American higher education to explaining the changes in England as well as some of my opinions on the matter. Read more »

I know I’m not the first person to blog about course evaluations (ProfHacker has at least three posts alone), and recently I’ve seen a few articles discussing campuses considering moving to online course evaluations and potential pitfalls, particularly in the area of response rates. (See for instance, Wired Campus writing on the topic.) This semester I had tremendous success in getting my students to complete the online Georgia Tech Course/Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS), and this post shares some of my thoughts on the matter. Read more »