Quantity and Quality in University Teaching

some minor notes on
quantity & quality
(university, why?)

Text

4:00 2:30 5:00

3:00 4:15

8:00 4:00 4:00

1
I am a technologist. In thinking about why I might have been invited here, and what I wanted
to say, I realised it was important to remember why I use technology in my teaching. It puts
the tools of production, of making, into the hands of my students. Making matters. I’m a
humanities academic. We have a sort of Cartesian schizophrenia where we accept the
separation of mind and body. We have ideas. We write words, abstractions. We don’t much
care about layout, fonts, though if we’re any good we do care about words and sentences.
You don’t eat in class because it is simply too carnal, and never submit an essay on coloured
paper if you want to be taken seriously. This separation of the corporeal body and the idea is
what I have worked against in all my teaching, and a lot of my research practice. New
technologies let students be creators, contributors, peers. Most importantly, they let us all
make different things, differently. It is in this differing that learning happens.

exercise caution

Beware of carpet baggers from the
south.
What I am going to wonder and
wander about is teaching.
Been invited here before, I liked my
ivory tower too much.
What’s a university to do,
educationally?

2
The things that make a difference for someone in Melbourne are quite different to regional
areas in most other parts of Australia. Last time I was at this conference Carol almost
certainly wanted me to talk about video blogging, RSS and the like. But I talked about much
more experimental things that video could do. Not that practical.

There is little structure. Just some ideas. I am doing and performing one of the ways in which
I think things can be done differently. A mix of little and larger ideas, anecdotes and
provocations. I tried it in different orders and there isn’t any that works much better than
another. Your experience of it should be mixed. Some of it will be a bit like a silent movie.

like a blog

This is a style of ‘thick description’.

3

like a blog

What I am talking about comes from
my experience as a media academic
and educator.

4
Media is one of the key sites undergoing radical transformation right now. It is exciting, I
think it is extraordinary to be a part of it. Media is at the pointy end of things and right
now I get to watch once solid institutions melt to become archaeological relics.

like a blog

and educator. I work in a post industrial
media ecology.

5
Industrial means things needed a lot of capital, and a lot of specialisation. Expensive to
make and access to the means of making media, let alone ﬁnding an audience, was highly
limited because it was so scarce. It was scarce because it was expensive. The post
industrial has reversed all the terms of this economy.

like a blog

media ecology. I think all of us do.

like a blog

media ecology. I think all of us do. It is
an ecology more than it is an economy.

6
It is an ecology not an economy because it really is a network. There are asymmetries, bits
that are bigger, more important, have bigger impact, but it is still interconnected and
inter-related and the relations between the parts are more important than the parts
themselves. The links to a site are much more important to Google than the site itself.
Relations matter, and this is an ecology. A simple premise from this is that relations
between students are as important, if not more, than the relation between the teacher and
the students.

my tribe

I work in media studies, and more
recently honours education across
media and communication.

7
All tribes have particular ways of going about doing things and of understanding their world.
The most powerful of these are those that have become internalised to the extent where the
values they express appear normal, natural, and just, well, common sense. Whatever we call
them, they are ideologies, and while we can’t escape ideology I think it is imperative to try to
be aware of them and to recognise the coercive force they have. There is an ideology of
education attached to being an academic. One thing I’m doing here is naming some of it, and
wondering about its legitimacy.

I have been instrumental in rebuilding the media studies curriculum at RMIT in Melbourne. I
have also led curriculum renewal for a large honours program within a school of media and
communication. Aside from disciplinary speciﬁcs the heart of this has been to appropriate a
range of strategies and methods from design education and practice and bring them into the
traditional humanities curriculum.

it is an effort to dissolve that cartesian distinction between thinking and doing .

my tribe

media and communication. It is a
luxury, yet this luxury lets us conceal
an awful lot.

8
The luxury is that I get students with high academic skills. The sorts who can write a 2000
word essay overnight and do pretty well. But these students are good enough, and well
enough acculturated to the learning regimes of measurement as assessment that it lets
education at university be lazy. Provide some content, set the reading, talk to them about it,
write an essay, mark it. Really it sounds a bit like an autopilot doesn’t it?

For academically inclined students it is easy to game the system, and these are the ones that
we hold up as exemplary, to show that we are good teachers (these are our high distinction
students). But they’re high distinction students in spite of us, not because. And they’re high
distinction students because they mirror the values of us as academics and that is what we
privilege. It does not follow that they are the best students, if best might mean they have
learnt or achieved the most through your subject, or have changed their understanding in
signiﬁcant ways.

my tribe

an awful lot. I am not an education
academic, though I have been to
education conferences.

my tribe

an awful lot. I am not an education
academic, though I have been to
education conferences. Education
academics appear to be as socialised
into conservative academic norms as
any other discipline or professional
body.

9
. Conferences run the risk of being the place where tribes reinforce why they matter to
themselves, on their own terms, in their own language. Or, as Kevin Kelly more or less put it,
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” We are as guilty
of this as any other institution. It’s what tribes do.

scarcity

I studied media in the 1980s. I went to
university to ﬁnd;

scarcity

university to ﬁnd; a scholarly
community, a video camera, an edit
suite, a reference library, experts, and
somewhere to argue about ideas.

scarcity

somewhere to argue about ideas. I can
now find the community online, the
camera is in my pocket, the edit suite is
on my laptop, the library begins with
Wikipedia, and I can find outstanding
blogs.

10
The university defines itself via an economy of scarcity. if you wanted these things, you had
to go to where they were. They were scarce because they were expensive. This is an industrial
model. Universities, to be very crude, had intellectual capital and the tools that went with that
(library, video cameras, edit suites). This is not the self definition used, but it is the reason
why universities could self define in the way that they did.

scarcity

blogs. Most of my students today go for
the same reason I did, fetishising the
technology.

scarcity

blogs. Most of my students today go for
the same reason I did, fetishising the
technology. Staff do the same.

11
In the media program I teach in students still subscribe to this model. This scarcity is partly
an effect of competitive entry - it is academically hard to get in to - but more importantly it
comes out in their fascination with thinking that they must use the best equipment and this
is how what they are doing matters. A technical fetish is used to generate scarcity. Staff
largely approach it the same way. This is a quantitative model where high quality equipment
is mistakenly thought to be related to high quality learning and outcomes. It is quantitative
because it is about tech standards. In other words they approach this as if we are still in an
industrial model.

This happens everytime someone uses the "but it is what industry uses" argument.
Lets be clear, a good ﬁlm or book is not really good because of the tools used to make it.

scarcity

In 1980 it was enough for the
university to offer these things.
Quantity was sufﬁcient because of
scarcity. Now?

being academic

I got to be an academic because I am
smart.

being academic

smart. Yet at primary and secondary
school you get taught without being
socialised into being teachers.

12
The sort of smart I am was easily recognised by teachers at university because it was more or
less smart in an academic way. I was a mature age student and keen to learn. I seemed to get
the importance of the ‘reﬂexive’ in art and theory and ﬁtted right into this sort of academic
environment. I was a high distinction student. When I became an academic people like me
were my best students. These were the ones I taught to. They got theory. The ones who
enjoyed my classes and had smart questions. They Iet me think I was pretty good at this
since look how good they were. But they were like me when I was a student. I was already like
that before I came to the university and apart from providing the place, the university didn’t
really do that much more. It certainly didn’t teach me how to be like that, how to get theory
and use it. It provided access, because access was scarce. They were industrial times.

being academic

smart. Yet at primary and secondary
school you get taught without being
socialised into being teachers.
At university good teaching too easily
becomes socialising our students into
becoming petite academics, little ‘me’s’.

13
For too many university academics this is the model of good teaching. We use the values and
standards of our own profession - a humanities academic - as the default pedagogical values
for our students. The essay, abstract theory, the conventions of citation and the short road to
hell that is plagiarism. As academics these are the socialised norms of my workplace which I
self identiﬁed with as a student. But it doesn’t follow that my students self identify with them,
nor that these are inherently the most valid elements of what university education is. In a
nutshell too many of us in university treat the attributes that drew us into the academy as the
pedagogical values of learning in the academy. This is a nonsense. The vast majority of my
students are not there to learn how to be academics, and most will never write an essay
again, ever.

being academic

As someone with this particular sort of
‘smart’ it turns out I’m good at
explaining things. I’m an associative
thinker (which is one of the reasons I
work in hypertext) and can join up stuff
for others.

being academic

for others.
But notice what has already happened.

being academic

for others.

14
Even my simple explanation privileges my expertise. My ability to explain. No one told me
this might not be the way to be a good teacher. This helped me think I was a pretty good
teacher. A qualitative change for me was the shift from understanding that it was not about
ﬁnding clever ways to explain complex ideas to others, but that my teaching could be the
practice of learning and discovery and making knowledge in itself. That my ‘black box’ of
theory and doing could be opened and named, prodded, and shown. (And that each student
had their own ‘black box’ of learning and knowledge which could be opened, named,
prodded and grown.)

being academic

for others.
I had become habituated to using my
academic norms to judge the academic
merit of my students.

15
The mistake, like so many other beginning university teachers, is to then think that these
values, the ones I self identify with, are those that matter to everyone else there. But for the
largest group, our students, they don’t.

quantity and quality

I have been thinking about quantity and
quality.

16
Quality is my response to why go to university. What I have called a quantitative view i think
informs most uni teaching that I see and hear.


quality. A quantity is something that
has number, scale.


has number, scale. It is pretty easy to
measure (it is something that is
measurable).


measurable). It is delightfully empirical.

17
Quantity, for better or worse, has underwritten most assessment for most of my peers.
Essays are measured by length, either words or pages, not by ideas or problems. Teaching is
a series of weeks, not topics (the weeks come first). When was the last time you heard a
student ask about comments on their work, rather than what mark they received? Because of
this assessment is, first of all, an economic transaction. For us and for them. (“It’s only worth
10%”.) The best students do the maths, the worse don’t.

numbers are how we measure, so when I teach students how to define their own assessment
criteria I insist they be empirical, because otherwise they don’t have any way to measure their
achievement. Later, with experience, they can do different.


A quality is an attribute that is
independent of quantity, of scale.


independent of quantity, of scale. How
many kids I have is a quantity. How I
feel about them is a quality.


independent of quantity, of scale. How
many kids I have is a quantity. How I
feel about them is a quality. This is
independent of quantity. (Though a
change in quantity can cause qualitative
change.)

18
A quality is a quality independent of how much of it there is. The redness of a red is that red
regardless of much of it I have. You measure quality by things like intensity, and to turn
quality into a quantity, into something that can be measured, is hard to do.

I think university learning needs to move from a quantitative to a qualitative model, though
this is different to the quality assurance models that we have.

For me learning should provide a qualitative change in understanding for those involved. This
is not the same thing as knowing more about something. It is knowing something differently.
Often it might be something small, but its consequences are large (it is an ecology).

I also think our teaching models, which in spite of everything remain largely content driven,
are a consequence of our assessment regimes. Not the other way around. I think if you were
given permission to assess qualitative outcomes, real qualitative ones, then what and how we
teach would change dramatically, and quickly.


19
I did mention on the previous slide that quantity can lead to qualitative change.
This graph shows an example of this. It is something I ask my honours students to do at the
end of their honours year. The horizontal line is neutral, above it means something for the
better, below something for the worse. In this one the green line is their knowledge about
their topic. Purple the course their research has taken in relation to where they thought it
would go. The pink their understanding of what research is as a practice. What I look for is a
steep line up, somewhere. When that is there then there’s been a qualitative change in their
understanding. For this student this happened partly around their project (the purple line, it
was an experimental audio drama) but most strongly around their understanding of research
as a practice, the pink with two big shifts through the year. This is a case of where quantity
leads to qualitative change as the scale of honours, the number of words required, helps a
shift in understanding.


“How do you know you are assessing
what your students have learnt?” From
here it was but a skip and a jump to
turnitin (.com). It is an untenable and
irrelevant arms race that has nothing to
do with learning, but a lot to do with
the acculturation of students into the
habitus of the university (as if they
care).

20
This is an example of what I’m talking about. Here quantity is all dressed up as a qualitative
outcome. Bah, hooey.

Here the “quality” learnt was that over 3 years the students learnt how to cite and write more
like an academic. Why do we think students are at university to learn how to be academics?.
These students were in a discipline related to medical imaging and diagnosis. When they are
looking at my MRI scan I don’t give a toss if they can write like mini-me academics, I want to
know that they have outstanding diagnostic skills. As an educator I see little connection
between one and the other. This makes one of the most common mistakes in university
education where we mistake the values that matter for us as academics - that is our
professional values - with those that matter educationally. This is academic narcissism. Being
able to write, academically, matters to me much more, than my students. And I imagine not
to most medical imaging professionals in their daily practice.


“How do you know you are assessing
what your students have learnt?” From
here it was but a skip and a jump to
turnitin (.com). It is an untenable and
irrelevant arms race that has nothing to
do with learning, but a lot to do with
the acculturation of students into the
habitus of the university (as if they
care). Evidence of copy and paste does
not tell me what has been learnt.

21
My question at the end was simply how do you know the students don’t know the copy and
paste material? He said he didn’t. His work is celebrated in the university as an exemplary
model of technological enabled learning.


I think there are simple category errors
happening that confuse quantity with
quality. More does not equal better.
Whether this is oversight, compliance,
auditing, assessment, access, contact.
Doing more (quantity), in universities, is
not a solution. It is doing differently
(quality). My problem is that if a
university has deﬁned itself via scarcity,
what is my job, now?

22
From my point of view he has built a complex academic compliance machine that rewards
behaving like ourselves. Cite often, cite well, cite properly, and we reward that. I think it is a
signiﬁcant effort of time to simply acculturate students to our own values, which we then
parade as good teaching.

This is an example of using a quantitative tool (turnitin.com) to achieve what are mistakenly
thought to be qualitative outcomes. The measurement was the decline of unattributed
citation, this is just about metrics. This is to be socialised into a normative set of standards
that matter to academics, but not necessarily to these students. What I am railing against is
the way the academy normalises this sort of coercive power as pedagogy and legitimate. It is
the stuff of ideology.


I think there are simple category errors
happening that confuse quantity with
quality. More does not equal better.
Whether this is oversight, compliance,
auditing, assessment, access, contact.
Doing more (quantity), in universities, is
not a solution. It is doing differently
(quality). My problem is that if a
university has deﬁned itself via scarcity,
what is my job, now? And what is
‘quality’?

paradigm change

23
This is the Lytro camera. Will be available next year. Rather than focussing light onto a plane
it captures the entire light ﬁeld. This means after the photo is taken you can vary the focus of
the image. Forever, for the photographer and the viewer. This is a paradigm shift, the sort
that is possible when the computer is used not only as a channel of delivery but as a
fundamental actor in the doing.

paradigm change

I am the ﬁrst or second person in the
world to have started videoblogging.

paradigm change

However, my idea for videoblogging is
quite different to what it has become.

paradigm change

quite different to what it has become. I
still think video for the internet age will
happen.

paradigm change

happen. Like blogs did for writing.

paradigm change

happen. Like blogs did for writing. With
blogs we have trackback, blogrolls,
pings, blogs and blog posts. It is a
network sensible thing made up of
whole fragments. It is porous and
granular.

24
We now take for granted what a blog is, but it is worth remembering how large a change they
represent for writing practice. I remain fascinated with their cinematic qualities, which
revolves around how they are whole fragments. A post is always whole, like a shot. But like a
ﬁlm a blog is made up of a serially arranged collection of posts, if you don’t have posts you
don’t really have a blog. The key thing that blogs formalised is an architecture that lets these
basic units remain addressable, singular and whole after becoming part of something larger.
this is a qualitative change for writing.

paradigm change

I often meet staff who tell me blogs
don’t work with their students.

paradigm change

Students complain about having to do
yet more blogging. They keep multiple
blogs for different subjects. They are
told what to write and assessed on just
these.

These are all bad models of blogging in university.

paradigm change

these. The same can be said about the
essay, but no one, students or staff, ever
ask why another essay has to be
written.

25
The essay is part of the ideology of the institution, hence it is unquestioned. As is the tute
paper. The exam. Vary from these and the students are as likely to get ansty as other staff. It
is not because they are conservative, it is because they have been so squashed by everything
to have simply gotten to university in the ﬁrst place.

Remember it is about difference, about not repeating the same.

paradigm change

ask why another essay has to be
written. If you don’t blog how do you
imagine you could teach with a blog?

paradigm change

ask why. If you don’t blog how do you
imagine you could teach with a blog? It
is a verb and a noun.

paradigm change

Blogging requires a change in practice.
This is a qualitative change.You can get
there via quantity, but numbers by
themselves won’t do it.

paradigm change

26
With a practice such as blogging there is resistance from students as it is simply different to
the forms of academic practice and assessment that they have been conditioned to. It is just
much messier than what they have learnt counts as learning. However, much like the graphs
from the honours students there is always a tipping point, and once you get over that tipping
point blogging more or less takes care of itself. To get over that tipping point requires
coercion, or seduction, and the strongest forms of coercion and seduction you have as a
teacher is assessment. So you need to spend a lot of your assessment budget on these things
at the beginning, and later you more or less get this budget back again to spend on other
things. Self assessment works the same way, too. As does the use of other, alternative
protocols and technologies.

affective pedagogy

If scarcity is no longer the reason to go
to university, what is?
What is the ecology of the post
industrial?
What do they learn from me if not my
expertise?
What is this idea of ‘quality’?

affective pedagogy

University today should provide an
experience that changes how I
understand what I understand. To learn
how to ‘be’ a learner in my discipline.
To learn a vocabulary of tacit
knowledge that is ready to hand.
Quality is not quality assurance (which
is an audit culture’s effort to make the
quantitative appear qualitative). It is a
qualitative change in understanding, a
difference that makes a difference in
how something is known.

27
This comes out of my interest and appropriate of design research and education where tacit
knowledge, knowing how, is recognised as a quality, as hard to teach, hard to learn, hard to
assess. But it is also recognised that it is tacit knowledge that provides the schema that let
you deal with difference, with wicked problems, with change, with the way things always talk
back. To learning how to listen for and have a conversation with this ‘back talk’, the way your
material, your stuff and ideas always push back. Learning how to ‘be’ I take from a recent
comment by Stephen Downes about the point of getting a university education. This is not
about content but a mode of engagement with learning and disciplinary knowledge that helps
you become a member of a tribe, with the proviso that you also recognise the problems that
this has.

affective pedagogy

This qualitative change is what I think
Meyer calls a threshold concept and can
include Perkins' notion of troublesome
knowledge.
With information so near to hand
knowledge, in a university, should
always trouble.

affective pedagogy

A threshold concept is:
transformative
probably irreversible
integrative
potentially troublesome

affective pedagogy

How? We shift towards other, differing,
new making — how we make (social,
shared, public, personal, aggregative),
what we make (mixed media, logical
forms outside of the teleological,
writing with, not to, media), and who
manages the making (students and
teachers as collaborators).
A qualitative change in the forms used
to express knowledge, in what counts
as knowledge, and how it is conducted.

28
So this is simply a call for learning studios, kindergartens if you like, with an emphasis on
making, but in a tertiary context. A making with a meta level of reﬂective and critical
engagement that is modelled, expected, performed, assessed, and scaffolded all the way
through. That measures and rewards the sorts of change in learning that should be rewarded,
rather than just knowing a lot.

paradigm change

29
As I ﬁnished this I thought there really isn’t much I’ve said. So I took a breath and
remembered that in universities most of what I’ve said is radical and met with blank stares of
misunderstanding and miscomprehension. Even down right hostility. For instance my
students assess their own participation in a subject. They do this extraordinarily well, with
rigour and responsibility. I have a protocol about how I do this, which I share with others.
Most refuse to believe that it works. It does. Universities no longer can rely on privilege (which
is just another form of scarcity) but once you take away all the ways we think we matter,
educationally, I think there is not a lot left. The emperor, if you like, is not wearing any
clothes. It is for us to step up here because we all know learning does matter. It is not only
that governments don’t get it, neither do many of our administrators, our peers, or our
students. So think about one thing, one small thing, that could be achieve a qualitative
change for your students, and do it. Don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness.

thank you

Adrian Miles
http://vogmae.net.au
RMIT University

Quantity and Quality in University Teaching

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