This article examines the 'Teaching Excellence Framework' (TEF) for UK universities through the lens of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. I argue that the TEF is a hyperreal simulacrum, a sign which has no traceable genealogy to the practice of learning and teaching.
The ‘student voice' is highly profiled in UK higher education, yet highly undertheorised.Over the past 20 years UK universities have gone from a taxpayerfunded,free at the point of use model, to one supported through tuition fees viaGovernment-backed loans. Subsequently, there is a growth of discourse aboutuniversities as businesses and students as paying customers/ consumers whoseopinions and demands must be considered. This article outlines four possibletheoretical lenses (or frameworks) through which student voice can be analysed,enabling an exploration of the vested interests and power relations entailed.These lenses draw on 1) Research on student voice and power in compulsoryeducation; 2) Regulatory capture from Economics 3) The notion of students voiceas part of an incomplete whole and 4) non-representational theory, developed in Human Geography by Nigel Thrif
Thirty years ago Boyer's report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) inspired the launch of the 'SoTL movement' which sought to raise the status of learning and teaching in higher education. In this paper we argue that despite its honourable intentions the SoTL movement has been a thorn in the flesh of serious scholarship into learning and teaching in higher education.Drawing on various debates within and outside the SoTL movement and interviews with teaching and learning leaders in the UK, we argue that the time has come to consign SoTL to history, and start the process of asserting the value of higher education research. A widened understanding of SoTL that we conceptualise as SoTL 2.0 has superseded and edged out earlier conceptualisations of SoTL (SoTL1.0), weakening SoTL's potential research rigour, legitimacy and validity.
Despite numerous criticisms of UK National Student Survey (NSS) institutional managers still strongly support its use in informing student choice, quality and assurance and quality enhancement activities (Ramsden et al 2010). The article outlines a granular and nuanced benchmarking system for the (NSS) which provides both a ‘raw' score (WSSS) and a normalised quotient (WSSQ) to enable users to take a more considered approach to the absolute and relative strengths and weaknesses of individual course programmes
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.