Developing Student Capability Through Modular Courses

Alan Jenkins, Lawrie Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135354695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Higher education in the UK has recently been transformed due to the introduction of module-style degree programmes. This collection of essays and case studies reviews the experiences of both students using the new modules and teachers integrating modular systems into their curricula.

Chapter One
Introduction

Alan Jenkins and Lawrie Walker

The modular structure makes it difficult, but not impossible to ensure the systematic development of interpersonal and communication skills.

(DES, 1991, p. 8)

This was the judgement of a visiting panel of Her Majesty’s Inspectors on the modular course at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes), one of the pioneering modular courses in the UK. The fear that modular courses result in intellectual fragmentation and make difficult the coherent and progressive development of student skills is one that is shared by many academics.

The basic principles of modular courses are now well known and established: they involve the division of the curriculum into limited units or modules of learning which are then assessed at the end of that unit, with the student building up a degree or award through such learning being credited.

Oxford Polytechnic’s modular course began in 1972. Then such modular schemes were rare in British higher education. Now most higher education institutions in the UK are moving towards some kind of modular provision. Much of the impetus for this ‘container revolution’ comes from a drive for efficiency as institutions seek to lower teaching and administration costs to deal with a declining unit of resource and achieve expansion of student numbers. There are also strong educational arguments for modular courses - these are explored by Lawrie Walker in Chapter 2 - but they are often subordinated to institutional requirements and arguments for efficiency.

Incompatible initiatives?

British higher education is replete with initiatives and policies, most of them from government and higher education funding bodies. Some of these initiatives support and reinforce each other. For example, policies to ensure a more skilled workforce reinforce policies to open up higher education to groups hitherto excluded. Other polices clash and contend. For example policies that require institutions to audit and assess their teaching effectiveness are developed at the same time as research assessment exercises. These immediately support individuals and departments that subordinate a concern for students to a desire to gain the rewards from a higher grade in the next research assessment exercise.

This book explores ways of reconciling two of these developments in British higher education. At the same time, as most HE institutions are going modular they are under increasing pressure from government, funding bodies and students themselves to ensure that their courses enable students to develop ‘capability’ - the skills and attitudes that empower them as lifelong learners and that give them an edge in a competitive labour market.

Modular structures can weaken, even imperil the development of student capability. Modular courses emphasize packaging knowledge into discrete units which can too often be soon forgotten. Modular courses generally emphasize student choice and flexible course patterns. Capability/skill development may best be developed through a coherent, systematic curriculum that some might see is best achieved through the traditional subject-based linear degree.

Student perspectives

When we asked students at Oxford Brookes about their experience of skill development in a modular framework, their comments picked out problems that we think would be represented in many and perhaps all modular courses (Jenkins and Rust, 1993). They saw modular courses as enshrining their choice of what (if not how) to learn. Students who were studying two subjects (fields) tended to see these as quite separate areas of knowledge. A student who had studied business and accounts saw ‘no real pattern’ to his learning. He was learning more but it was all ‘higgledy piggledy’. Two first-year students could see no point, no relation, between the modules they took outside earth sciences to the programme of studies within that field. A geography student told us that many of her friends avoided modules which required them to work in groups. Even if these students saw these modules as helping them to practise key (employability) skills, they perceived themselves as weak in these areas and sought to avoid such courses. Often the modular structure allowed them to make that choice.

Many students commented that certain skills - in particular group work - were encountered again and again, but with little or no training and no sense of progression and limited or non-existent feedback. As they and the staff finished a module the were on to the next batch with no time or opportunity for reflection and feedback.

One might conclude from these comments, and those of staff and students in other modular courses, that in their emphasis on flexibility and choice modular courses to an extent disempower students and certainly do not necessarily lead to more skilful/capable students. Yet other comments (often by the same students) saw modular courses as enabling and even developing their capability. A recurrent theme was that modular courses developed their ability to manage time and tasks. The philosophy of choice made them feel more responsible for their learning while the term assessments made them work hard and consistently. Students from a wide range of subjects described how skills had been integrated into the way those subjects were taught and assessed. Furthermore, some students were using the choice offered by modular programmes to build up a portfolio of skills and abilities. A few were aware of university-wide discussions to better integrate and develop transferable skills throughout the modular course.

Reconciling modularity and student capability

We are critical of the traditional British degree structure. Coherence was often more in the view of staff than in the experience of students. Staff needs for disciplinary boundaries and coherence often took precedence over student needs. Seldom were transferable/employability skills clearly developed in such degree programmes.

However, we do recognize that modular courses can easily lead to intellectual incoherence and fragmentation. This book is based on the belief that modular courses can be designed so as to build in a capability perspective. The organization of the book shows how we consider this can be achieved by subject groups and by whole institutions. In Section A we consider how institutional structures can be designed to develop learner autonomy and student employability. We also briefly consider how modular developments in schools and further education will shape those students’ experiences before they enter higher education.

In Section B our scale of observation is that of the subject group. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives we see how skills can be progressively developed through core modules and by disciplines defining and developing core skills.

In Section C we show how a basic principle of modular courses - that of crediting learning - can be its greatest strength in developing student capability. We consider the experience of a variety of institutions that have used modular credits to value and develop a wide range of skills. The particular initiatives differ, varying from students working in local schools to students helping other students to develop information technology skills. All these initiatives show how choice and modular credits can be used to develop capability.

In Section D our perspective is that of the whole institution or a large department or faculty. Again the initiatives are particular: rewriting all modules/courses in a common format using learning outcomes; getting students and staff to reflect and communicate what is the reality of the student experience; using learning contracts and/or profiling as a way to help the students coherently develop their skills through large modular courses. Though these particular initiatives vary they share the common aim of ensuring that large modular structures and course requirements enable student capability.

Finally, in Section E, we look to the future of modular schemes in Britain and the emerging European and international credit frameworks.

Beyond British experience

All of the case studies reported here are British and grow out of the immediate pressures of British higher education. For those of us in the UK there is a danger of seeing these changes from a very insular perspective. We should remind ourselves that many national higher education structures are modular. The ideas for the Oxford Polytechnic’s ‘pioneering’ modular course grew out of the knowledge of West African and North American experience of its first Dean, David Mobbs. In North America the idea of crediting student effort by hours studied (Carnegie units) developed in the late 19th century. Through a complex but interlocking structure, the North American higher education system offers students choice to develop and credit their learning by moving in and out of institutions throughout their lives. North America shows others the ‘value’ and the ‘efficiency’ of these modular arrangements. They also remind us that modular courses can lapse into bureaucracy and intellectual incoherence. An American study of US higher education reported that:

The curriculum has given way to a marketplace philosophy: it is the supermarket where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning. Fads and fashion, the demands of popularity and success, enter where experience should prevail …. The marketplace philosophy refuses to establish certain common expectations and norms …. It is as if no one cared as long as the store stayed open.

(Association of American Colleges, 1985, pp. 2-3)

In 1993 a high-level report echoed a similar critique. The report, ‘An American imperative: higher expectations for higher education’, argued that ‘Much too frequently, American higher education offered a smorgasbord of fanciful courses in a fragmented curriculum’. Amongst its recommendations are for institutions and subject groups to clearly define the learning outcomes and ‘knowledge skills and abilities’ they expect of graduates (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1993). Prompted by these critiques, contemporary North American higher education offers a whole series of initiatives to ensure coherence and progressive skills development within modular credit framework. Many institutions have moved to ideas of a core curriculum, often in general education programmes (Graff, 1991). At both federal and state levels there are moves to define core skills that all students should develop. Innovative programmes are being developed at many institutions to provide their own framework to extend student abilities and these are often reported in journals such as Change, Chronicle of Higher Education and The College Professor.

British modular courses can learn much from this rich and varied experience. In turn we hope readers outside the UK can benefit from the issues and case studies reported here. We are early learners in these territories of modularity and skills, but we are learning fast.

References

Association of American Colleges (1985) Integrity in the College Curriculum, Washington DC: Association of American Colleges.

Chronicle of Higher Education (1993), ‘An American imperative: higher expectations for higher education’, December 8, A26.

Department of Education and Science (1991) The Modular Course at Oxford Polytechnic: A report by HMl, Stanmore, Middlesex: DES.

Graff, J G (1991) New Life for the College Curriculum, San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Jenkins, A and Rust, C (1993) ‘Modular Courses and Students’ Transferable Skills: Perspectives from Oxford Brookes University’, Educational Methods Unit, Oxford Brookes University. (This video can be purchased from the Education Methods Unit, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford 0 X 3 OBP.)

Section A:
Developing Modular Frameworks

Chapter 2
The New Higher Education Systems, Modularity and Student Capability

Lawrie Walker

The modular argument

For two decades modularity in the British education system has advanced and retreated like waves on a beach. In higher education the waves are washing at the base of very old cliffs. Modularity is fashionable. The reasons are well-rehearsed - new clients with new needs and mixed modes of study, customer choice, credit frameworks, blurring boundaries between academic disciplines, new integrations between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ programmes, the pressure of Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning (APEL) and National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) - and a claimed cost-effectiveness.

The curricular case for well-designed modular programmes is also well-rehearsed - student choice, learner autonomy, flexibility for individual student circumstances, adaptability to new modes of learning and assessment, speed of response to external pressures and agencies, openness to new kinds of knowledge and new connections. As with all things, however, its potential strengths are its possible weaknesses. Poorly designed modular programmes are vulnerable to intellectual incoherence, to problems with continuity and progression of learning, to loss of student identity and to excessive bureaucracy. It may be that such charges can equally be levelled at some non-modular courses (coherence is not guaranteed by length of course and lack of student choice) but it seems true that modular programmes are prone to fragmentation unless carefully designed and monitored.

This book is about the promotion of ‘capability’ in students who are studying on modular course. ‘Capability’, like ‘enterprise’ and ‘lifelong learning’ is something of a catchall: if it is going to be a criterion it will need to be defined. When I think of the word ‘capability’ I think of ‘Capability’ Brown, who designed landscapes which combined technical skill, beauty and utility with natural elegance. At each turn a new combination of shape, colour, texture, a subtle exposure, a hidden stream, an open vista, a closure round a statute or a building, a lake curving behind a wooded hill, hints and revelations: and all planned to develop over time with trees and flowers whose full shapes and interleavings were seen only by later generations. That combination of imagination and skill which could comprehend material, space and time in a practical vision earned him his name. If I may extrapolate from a long-dead man to our extremely lively undergraduates, I define capability as the ability to turn ideas into action through knowledge, imagination and skill. To do that people need information and the knowledge to find and use information; they have to be able to plan and carry through their intentions; they require technical and professional skills and the skills to persuade people to take their ideas seriously, to work with others towards a common end; and they need the courage and independence to carry their work forward and test it against the judgement of others. Knowledge alone is insuff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Contributors
• Glossary
• Chapter One: Introduction
• SECTION A: DEVELOPING MODULAR FRAMEWORKS
• SECTION B: CORE MODULES AND CORE SKILLS
• SECTION C: DEVELOPING SKILLS THROUGH STUDENT CHOICE AND INDEPENDENT STUDY
• SECTION D: LARGE-SCALE SOLUTIONS
• SECTION E: TOWARDS THE FUTURE
• Index