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Global survey reveals the ‘lives, hopes and fears’ of nearly 17,000 students
A new global survey has found that a significant number of both Australian and international students want more online learning and shorter courses, especially if it will result in lower tuition fees.
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While we certainly need to account for students desires and wishes, if not least because they will vote with their feet and attend programs that are a better match, it is also worth noting that that there are other factors that are important. Many of these are outside of the initial experiences and judgements of the students, and it is not until they look back afterwards and see that some of these were very worthwhile, but weren’t anticipated at the time.
I see this in many ways, but one comment I regularly hear from former students is that such and such a unit (sometimes ones that I have taught, sometimes others) was the best/most useful in their course, but they didn’t realise this until they were out in the ‘real world’. If we hadn’t made them do these units, many never would have.
Another analogy on this matter relates to the reliance some institutions put on student survey data as main evidence around teaching quality. While this data is one dimension, students are not experts on teaching quality and this data is seen to be poorly correlated with actual teaching quality.
The journey can be important and we often don’t appreciate this until we are properly experiencing elements of it.