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It will be up to publishers to make the case for how their teaching materials help institutions to meet the requirements of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and providing data evidence will be key, a panel discussion marking Academic Book Week heard yesterday (Wednesday 25th January).
Blackwell's c.e.o. David Prescott, Pearson Higher Education publishing director Richard Stagg, Cengage Learning director of Higher Education Andrew Robinson and HE consultant Brian Hipkin discussed the opportunities of the TEF for academic booksellers and publishers at an event organised by the Booksellers Association and held at the British Library.
The TEF - which, if it goes ahead, will sit alongside the established Research Excellence Framework (REF) in measuring the success of higher education institutions - is set to place new emphasis on teaching excellence, and, while still evolving, will initially be measured via six core metrics. These include data-driven assessment of the level of teaching and academic support students receive, the retention of students across the courses, and the employment levels of students after graduating. Institutions will be awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze status according to how they score on these metrics, and that award will determine the level at which they can set course fees, as well as having status implications.
Hipkin, c.e.o. of consultancy ReFRAME, told the panel that on learning resources TEF will encourage institutions to personalise learning and make use of digital resources, and he encouraged the industry to take a proactive approach. "The criteria around learning resources gives you a point of entry," he said. "It's about helping them [the institutions] to provide platforms that can produce the data they can use to contextualise...to say, 'Our students read this number of books, we can see a clear relationship between the materials we supply and retention, a clear relationship between the materials we supply and achievement'. In many ways, it is up to you to argue the case of where you can give support and clarity, because they will not necessarily come to you."
Prescott noted that with the vast majority of campus book sales still textbooks, the TEF as a supporter of the primary tool of teaching was bound to be positive. It would also support the use of university-funded textbook schemes, he argued, since they offer a guarantee that all students will have access to the materials they need to achieve on their course. But he warned that the lack of direct representation of booksellers and publishers on the HEFCE panel deciding assessment outcomes, despite lobbying from the BA for them to be so, was a "missed opportunity", particularly given the "huge amount of quality metrics on student engagement" that platforms such as Blackwell's own can provide.
Pearson's Stagg said the TEF "will unlock a lot of energy and innovation around delivering and evidencing...an opportunity because we have the chance now to work with resources that can do a better job of supporting that...Data will be central to whole TEF exercise. The textbooks we've lovingly published for many centuries stay silent on how much they are used and how much the particular learner has understood of what they've read...the complements to textbooks and the digital successors to them can do a lot more to assist the evidencing of teaching."
Publishers are developing the tools that will allow teachers to invervene when students are falling behind, and to understand how many of the students in front of them have mastered topic X or Y and therefore what technique to employ to support their learning, he said. However the sheer scale of investment needed for these platforms was a challenge, as well as the new capabilities - such as integration engineers, research efficacy teams - that publishers were needing to bring on board. "Fifty per cent of the jobs in my organisation didn't exist five years ago," he noted.
From Cengage, Robinson said TEF could be the biggest change in higher education for a generation and the big challenge for the industry is to make sure it can participate. Robinson said that while the introduction of tuition fees has changed the way some institutions have looked at the model of providing course materials, that hasn't been as widespread as Cengage had anticipated. "One of the things we are looking to observe with the advent of TEF is how much this will change this," he said.
As with previous speakers, he focused on the role publishers' data can take in helping institutions make their case for the REF requirements, but he warned that this was still a "work in progress". "We have still got to figure out how we can collectively, as booksellers, aggregators and publishers, can more effectively insert ourselves to make the needs that the institutions now have relevant to the content that we have," he said.
The TEF will be a focus of the BA's APS Conference, to be held in Stratford-on-Avon on 18th-19th May.
Scott Hamilton, head of retail at Blackwell, blogs about the opportunity of the TEF here.