Roger Thomas
Editor, Physiology News

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.102.5

This issue features articles on elite physiology in animals, to mark The Society’s Theme for 2016 – ‘Elite Performance’ and the coinciding Topic Meeting in Nottingham on the Biomedical Basis of Elite Performance (in humans). Looking through the programme, I see no mention of non-human animals, though surely some of the experiments must have been done on rodents. Physiology News hopes to broaden the field with articles on horses, insects (twice) and bats. Also, we publish an article on nasal airflow, which apparently often switches from one nostril to the other.

A topic stimulating much argument in my host department recently has been our decision to stop giving our students hard copy handouts for each lecture. Typically, they were given 5 or 6 sides of A4 notes and illustrations, taken from the lecturers own notes and slides. The cost in paper and time was considerable, but the students did like this system. Many would simply highlight key phrases or headings during the lecture, and tended to lose their ability to take notes. Apart from saving money, one argument we deployed was that the ability to take notes is actually a valuable transferrable skill. Colleagues with children at other Universities said their children did not get handouts at all. Indeed when I was a student, we were lucky to get a printed timetable. Notes had to be written on paper, for later interpretation and amplification from textbooks. Now of course almost all students have tablets and/or laptop computers on which they might type notes if they have learned to touch-type. Some even make audio or video recordings, although supposedly only with special permission. We do still put some sort of brief handout on a website and did leave files of last year’s handouts on the same site. Thus, some students printed the latter and brought them to this year’s lectures. One had the temerity to email me asking for an explanation of an experiment in last year’s notes, which I had decided to leave out of this year’s lecture!

I am still surprised how popular lectures seem to be in the sciences. I have come to believe that attending lectures is still seen as a key part of being student, and of course it’s a good place to meet friends. Could it be a substitute for what used to be a religious ceremony? In the middle ages, students were in effect in monasteries, and had to attend chapel several times a day. Now they attend lectures instead, although there are many other ways to collect the material needed to pass exams.

I have been reading parts of the government white paper about Higher Education entitled “Fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice.” Apparently this was a manifesto commitment. The proposal is to reshape the higher education landscape to place students at its heart. (Do landscapes have a heart?) One way this will be done is a classic fudge – set up a new regulator that has a clear remit to champion value for money and the student interest in its decisions: the new “Office for Students”. I am not making this up. Making the student at the heart of the HE system is a bit of a switch from placing research there. The authors of this paper do seem to appreciate that up until now very few universities assign teaching the same significance that they give research. Money has till now always been allocated by measuring research quality. They propose incentives to drive up teaching quality without damaging research. The incentives seem to be allowing Universities with a high rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to charge higher fees.

Details about how teaching will be judged are sparse. The four areas which will make up the quality rating seem to be: setting and maintaining academic standards, how learning opportunities are provided, how information about learning opportunities is provided and “enhancement of quality of students’ learning opportunities”. I don’t understand what this means in practice. Lots of form-filling I suppose. More important than anything surely is deciding what to include in the curriculum, and how best to actually teach it.

Perhaps the main problem with the present system, which has employers complaining about graduates lacking useful skills, is that success as a student almost all depends on the ability to do well in written examinations. This surely is not a skill useful in a normal career. At least the Italian system of examining by viva does help prepare graduates for careers involving speaking in front of a critical audience. In the UK, vivas are rarely used since it is seen as important to minimise stress. I have long thought that employers should be involved in changing how students are assessed, since the assessment process drives so much of a student’s learning efforts. I once introduced a paper involving critically reviewing a recent publication, but when I went on sabbatical the other examiners dropped it. To be fair, in some ways, University teaching does prepare students for one type of career – that of the University academic. But that is not going to increase the gross national product.

My photo above shows the facial effects of falling down a flight of wooden stairs in the dark. As well as many severe bruises my GI tract managed a complete shut-down for about 2 weeks. But no bones were broken, very luckily.