Lecturer's Blog 5: When Quantity Meets Quality by Maarten Gijsenberg

When Quantity Meets Quality

Whether you are teaching in a bachelor or a master program, one thing likely has not gone unnoticed: the ever increasing number of students, with some of our master programs now even having the size of the average bachelor program. As we pride ourselves with the quality of our teaching, question then becomes how we can preserve – or even increase – this quality when facing such increases in the quantity of students. Indeed, we need to admit that over the years, this has become a constant struggle for most of us. We want the best for our students, and do ever better, but how can we achieve this when year after year student numbers only go up? Will quantity come at the cost of quality?

One of the things that may help us out, is the integration of technological innovations in our teaching. In that sense, the covid-19 crisis has somewhat served as a big experiment with the integration of new ways of teaching and evaluating in our curriculums. Lectures and tutorials went online, and even examination took place in a virtual environment. We have learned that some things of which we had high hopes did not work out really well. At the same time, we discovered opportunities we could never even have dreamed of.

Don’t tear down that wall!

One of the claims that is often raised (also by our RUG Director Education Rutger Klein Nagelvoort), is the fact that physical lectures do not work for large groups, and that when they “only” deal with knowledge transfer, they can easily be replaced by online videos. Of course, abolishing physical lectures would be nice for the budget of the university – no more need for large lecture halls, so tear down those walls! However, I tend to disagree.

Last year, we all learned that online teaching has serious limitations, as it is hard to have interaction with and get feedback from students on whether they actually get the message. This, in addition, becomes even harder the larger the groups are. Physical lectures, on the other hand, suffer much less if at all from these issue. So, while replacing physical lectures by online alternatives is often proposed as an ideal solution for teaching to large groups, it may in fact even lead to lower quality for larger quantity.

This being said, what makes that physical lectures provide high quality to high quantity? Jump back to 1999, my first year in university. We were about 370 freshmen in my program, so we were what you could call a large program. Courses on Psychology and Philosophy were packed, with students sitting on the stairs of the lecture hall. The course on Sociology, on the other hand, reached rock bottom with only 17 students left (I basically just kept attending the lectures to see what would be the lowest number of attendants), while Mathematics, taking place on Friday morning at 8am and taught by a very sarcastic professor, was also one of the best attended courses…

So, what made that the third course seemingly did not attract students, while the other three did? The first two courses were taught by professors that were great story tellers, showing lots of passion for their topic. They made us reflect both on the topic and ourselves, and were open to questions and discussion. As a student, you knew that there would be some kind of “magic” during those sessions. The Mathematics course, in turn, was a really hard course, but had a professor who was very well able to make the matter accessible and understandable to students. As such, he was a great guide who came down from the “obvious hill”, and put himself in the position of the students. He also did it in a literal way, by walking around with a microphone to ask questions to students and to challenge them, thus often scaring the hell out of us. Most popular quote: “Bart says to Homer: Think harder”. All three courses were, each in their way, engaging students, involving them in the matter, and clearly providing interaction and value. The Sociology professor, on the other hand, limited himself to reading out loud his handbook, thrilled and thrilling as if he would have been reading the phone book.

So, I would say, don’t tear down that lecture hall wall yet. Passion, mastery, interaction and instant feedback, engagement, magic… Those are just some of the things that physical lectures have as assets over online tools to provide high quality knowledge transfer to high quantity groups.

Oxford quality for Groningen quantity

Does this mean that technology does not add much? Certainly not! As we speak, there are several projects/pilots running at FEB with the integration of technology in evaluating students’ work and providing them with better feedback on their work. The ultimate goal of these projects is to come up with a learning experience that provides high-quality and insightful individual feedback (you can call it Oxford quality) for large numbers of students (which you can call Groningen quantity).

One such project involves individualized examination. Instead of having all students work on a same assignment/set of exam questions, each student thereby gets an individual assignment/set of exam questions. This would at the same time hamper simple copy-pasting and/or exam fraud and increase learning from students. Sounds utopic? Actually, it is more realistic than you would expect, although it may be more suited for methods courses. The basic idea is to use some program code to first generate for each individual student an individual dataset according to some specifics set by the teacher (and possibly based on the student number, for instance), and then run the required analyses on those datasets. It thus provides an individual example solution for each student the teacher can use to grade the assignment/exam. Using well-developed rubrics then adds to the ease of grading and the quality of feedback to the student.

Another project takes things even further down the road of technological support of evaluating students’ performance. Imagine you have a 400-student bachelor course. How to evaluate the students? First thing that comes to mind would be a multiple choice exam. However, creating a large pool of MC questions is not an easy thing (especially not when you need to do it several years in a row and do not want questions to become publicly available, thus requiring ever new questions), and overall, feedback to students is limited. In addition, testing in-depth understanding and the possibility to link within a course is not a given. Using Artificial Intelligence based tools now allows for the use of broader, open questions. The teacher has to train the AI software based on e.g. the first 40-60 exams – thereby also linking the answers to clearly defined rubrics –, after which the software has a sufficient basis to proceed with the grading and providing of insightful feedback. Once the grading is done, the student has access to the feedback, and of course may still have some remarks. Still, the understanding and learning by the students is likely considerably higher, while at the same time, the teacher only has to handle the remarks by the students, and does not need to grade all individual exams.

Technology to the rescue?

So, will technology save us? It will definitely help us in the near future to combine high quantity with high quality. However, we should be aware that it is there to help us, not to replace us.

For the next blog, I would like to pass the honor to our colleague Ahmed Skali. Ahmed recently joined FEB coming from Melbourne, Australia. Moving from the other side of the world (and a different teaching system) to Groningen: Quite an experience in times of Covid-19!