From:	sfie6478@mail.usyd.edu.au
Sent:	Tuesday, 27 March 2001 6:48 PM
To:	eet.sen@aph.gov.au
Subject:	Submission to senate inquiry
I was one of 5 [unpaid] education officers at the Sydney Uni SRC in 2000, 
and in that capacity I spoke to many students and academics about their 
teaching/learning conditions.

Tutorial teaching, formerly central to university pedagogy, is in its 
traditional form extremely costly, and as a result is under attack from all 
sides.  Funding squeezes and decreasing staff/student ratios both impact 
directly on the possibility of small group discussion style teaching.  Our 
administration has taken a corporate 'all power, no reponsibility' 
approach, where budgets are determined from on high, but most other 
decision making is left to the individual departments.

The individual departments have responded in four main ways, all of 
which are problematic.  
i)  by increasing the size and decreasing the number of tutorials for a 
given subject
ii)  by running 'seminars' instead of tutorials
iii)  by making lecturers and professors teach tutorials
iv)  by running 'virtual tutorials' online
I will address each of these in turn.

i)  increased size and decreased number of tutorials

The most obvious reaction to less money and more students.  Philosophy 
are required to place a minimum of 25 students in a tutorial, computer 
science regularly have 50% more students than computer terminals.  
Maths had up to 1999 an absolute cap on tutorial sizes of 25, which was 
recognised to be problematic from an educational point of view; now 
further cuts mean their cap has been raised to 30.  The increased size of 
tutorials means that in many smaller third year subjects there is only one 
tutorial time - for me this semester alone there are 2 subjects for which I 
can't make the single tutorial time.

The larger size of tutorials changes the sort of experience which students 
derive from them.  There is less time for each student to test out their 
views, shyer students are less likely to participate, more presentations 
and less discussion, less critical thinking, less help for students with 
difficult scientific concepts etc etc.

There was a period during which senior philosophy courses had no 
tutorials at all, but now the credit point value of a two-lecture-a-week 
course has been doubled and in this extremely problematic way enough 
resources have been freed up to run tutorials.

ii)  seminars

Recognising that larger group sizes mean that tutorials are no longer 
fulfilling the pedagogical goals of a tutorial, some departments have 
stopped pretending, and now have 'seminars' instead.  A seminar holds 
as many people as you like, and is generally distinguished from a lecture 
by having more opportunity for questions or by having students do the 
presentation.  The industrial relations department at Sydney Uni has 
taken this approach, but as one academic noted, attendance at the 
seminars is very poor - because students just don't get much out of them.  
Law also teaches using seminars instead of tutorials - 40-50 people in 
each.

iii)  professor- and lecturer-run tutorials

Traditionally, tutorials had been run by doctoral and postdoctoral students.  
This system had many advantages.  The academics-to-be got important 
teaching experience, the students benefitted from a slightly different 
account of the issue from that given in the lecture, the professors and 
lecturers were free to spend their time preparing and teaching other 
courses.  Even from a purely mercenary point of view, post-docs and 
PhDs cost a lot less to the department to teach the tutorials.  Now, 
however, particularly in the arts faculty, close to 100% of the faculty budget 
is spent on the salaries of permanent staff.  There is no money to employ 
PhDs and postdocs casually, so as well as losing the other benefits cited 
above, senior academic staff spend their time teaching tutorials, can't 
teach so many other courses because of time restraints, and the number 
of courses on offer decreases.

iv)  Virtual Tutorials

Art History and Theory gives no tutorials to first years, opting for a 
web-based discussion instead, plus a 10 minute personal consultation 
with the lecturer once a semester.  This is the most solid example of an 
insidious trend across the university, which in most departments is still in 
the experimental phase; that is, the trend to use web resources not to 
supplement learning but to replace and undermine it.  [I don't know the 
details of how this web discussion proceeds - if anyone is specifically 
interested, I could put them in contact with people who know more about 
it]

Our administration is impervious to all complaints; as I mentioned before, 
it holds all power but takes no responsibility.  It pretends that it can't see 
the causal link between its budgetting and teaching practices; it even 
dismisses examples of bad learning conditions and understaffing as 
anecdotal, isolated incidents.  It sings the praises of computer technology 
endlessly, with a hard-to-take-seriously disclaimer that 'we 
think traditional tutorial learning is very important.' as an afterthought.  
When we complain that 
tutorials are overcrowded [ie too many students per tutor] they counter that 
they are building bigger rooms, refusing to engage with our arguments at 
all.

Students such as myself can only hope that this Senate inquiry will come to 
realise the full extent of the crisis in higher education in Australia today.  
I have focussed on tutorial conditions only in my submission, not because it is 
the only problem, but because as a full time student ineligible for Youth 
Allowance, I work and don't have more time to spare.

Sandra Field

sandra@student.usyd.edu.au
0410 330 413/ 02 9816 4303
100 Barons Cres
Hunters Hill 2110 NSW
-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: www-mail.usyd.edu.au