At this stage, we’re in the planning and design phase, with entry starting in 2014. That means doing both programme design and marketing activities now, so that it’s all in place for next autumn. As programme director, I will be writing up the validation documentation, coordinating various colleagues and teaching on the core modules.

These core modules will be shared by all the students, regardless of their specialisations, and offer an opportunity for students to encounter different disciplines and approaches, so developing their own understanding.

Working with our current Associate Dean, I’m looking at how we can best create an open and inclusive space for students to bring their different knowledges and practices into a discussion and debate that will allow them to contextualise and develop their abilities. Obviously, from my end, I can see a lot of overlap with the reflective elements of my current teaching, but I also want to try and explore new territory with the modules.

With that in mind, I’m seriously thinking about getting into a problem-based learning (PBL) model. PBL has the big advantage that it is fundamentally student-led, so it is better able to accommodate the variety that I anticipate finding in the classroom. Moreover, it is not prescriptive, in the sense that students find their own answers to the problems they face, and so is much more grounded and adapted to their needs.

On a more prosaic level, PBL is something that I’ve skirted around as a pedagogy for some time, and this seems like a good opportunity to get stuck in.

So it’s off to the library/e-journals to read up and see where I can take this. If you have any PBL experiences (good or bad), then I’d love to hear about them.

The Institute for International Education (IIE) is one organization that helps bring
students from different cultures together. One of its major programs is to provide emergency assistance to foreign students and scholars who are under threat. Currently the IIE, in partnership with Jusoor and the Illninois Institute for Technology, is leading a consortium of universities that is providing emergency support to students from Syria.

Here is one such student, who after receiving a scholarship to attend college in the USA, still needs about $3,800 to cover travel, insurance, and other incidental expenses. All donations go directly to the university’s Office for International Programs. I encourage you to support him and others like him — people who have had their educations interrupted by circumstances beyond their control.

Pre- and post-test for an introduction to IR course: 

• Sovereignty is the principle that . . .
• Nationalists typically believe that . . .
• Liberal theories of international relations claim that . . .
• Realist theories of international relations claim that . . .
• Constructivist theories of international relations claim that . . .
• Bandwagoning occurrs when . . .
• Balancing occurs when . . .
• . . .  contribute to a state’s soft power.
• . . .  contribute to a state’s hard power.
• The current international distribution of power is best described as . . .
• For a strategy of deterrence to succeed . . .
• The two-level game refers to a situation in which . . .
• Rational choice theory assumes that individuals . . .
• Hindsight bias occurs when . . .
• Cognitive consistency refers to the practice of . . .

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them, even if they are of the “I can’t believe you didn’t include . . .” variety.

However, there has been one aspect of this that has particularly struck me this year, namely feedback.

For reasons that I will not dwell upon, I released marks to students before I could return to them the feedback forms produced by the markers. Normally, we would do this at the same time, to try and maximise the engagement with the feedback, but it wasn’t possible this time.

In my email telling students were posted, I explained about the double-blind marking process. I’ll assume most of you will know this, but if not, it’s simply giving a first (the supervisor) and second (another colleague) markers copies to mark at the same time, which they do without any sight of the other’s marking: differences are then reconciled at a meeting afterwards, to produce an agreed mark.

Despite explaining this, all of the responses that I received from students to the mark release asked how their mark had been arrived at. A consequence of double-blind marking is that there is no anchoring of marks (as when one moderates), hence there is more mobility of marks (up or down) from any interim feedback process (of which we have much with dissertations).

In all those cases, I replied, explaining the system again, followed shortly by the feedback forms from both markers. Even when I did this, I had another query from a student about the differences between markers and the potential impact that might have with any external moderation.

All of this suggests a number of things.

A pile of dissertations, today

Firstly, double-blind marking (and probably all kinds of marking protocol) need to be explained repeatedly throughout modules and programmes of study, so that students might more reasonably understand the logistics and effects of the approach. This might sound mundane, but I’ve had enough conversations with academics about the difference between marking and moderation to know that mundane things are not the same as simple things.

Secondly, it has highlighted the importance of contextualising marks with feedback. In this particular case, many of our students are thinking of graduate study, so their performance in the dissertation is particularly important, so good quality, constructive feedback is essential. My concern in this case is that the mark will be what is remembered. Indeed, it is noticeable that I had more comments back about marks than about the feedback this time, and I would venture to say that this is a general pattern.

Thirdly, the process has once again pointed one of the difficulties of giving useful feedback to final year students in their final semester. In previous years, much of the feedback I and my colleagues produce for these students at this time of year (for dissertations or coursework) never gets back to students, because they have already left and have little motivation to collect feedback on work that’s now behind them. We have tried sending out feedback, but with moderate impact. Perhaps we need to think again about how we can close the loop of studying, so that our students get the full benefit of their time with us.

Yet we tell students something else entirely: that they should have the courage to fail, and to learn from it. And any system — whether a business or a living organism — grows weak if its constituent parts are not allowed to fail. It’s much better to fail often and fail fast, because learning what doesn’t work early on and responding to this information will minimize harm and generate the largest benefits.

In other words, to paraphrase a regional director from Google whom I’ve heard speak on innovation:

• Move fast
• Experiment, but make sure to measure what you’re doing
• Accept that you might be wrong
• Focus on results and use a data-driven approach to make difficult decisions
• Cut your losses without remorse

Evolution functions according to these principles. Universities generally do not. And this idea led me to revisit Nassim Taleb, whose work, at least on the non-technical side, I was already somewhat familiar with. In the changing landscape of higher education, many universities now fit his description of a fragile system, which is represented by the graph below.

The vertical axis is relative gain or loss in whatever the system is dependent on. For businesses, and that includes universities, this is revenue. The horizontal axis is delta, or change in some input. For a standard business, that means sales. For a university, it’s basically students.   The graph shows a system that is at high risk of catastrophic failure if there is a relatively small negative change in inputs.

Let’s say a university enrolls five percent more students — move a certain distance to the right on the horizontal axis — and there’s a corresponding increase in net revenue. The green line goes up. For the purposes of example, let’s say revenue increases by $20 million. If we make delta negative — and we decrease enrollment by five percent — the revenue change is not -$20 million, it’s much greater. The red line drops farther and faster than the green line goes up. There’s a second order effect in which the downward rate of change accelerates. So the university, or whatever system you might be looking at, is at extreme risk if there is a relatively small unfavorable perturbation in the environment.

So what’s the solution? Universities should do what we tell our students to do. They should be constantly experimenting to figure out how they can become less dependent on their traditional products and services — the markets in which competition is the most aggressive  – and enter market niches that lack dominant players. This might mean continuously and ruthlessly testing new courses, delivery formats, degree programs, or even educational services that aren’t oriented around completion of a degree.

The comment really brought home the fact that students don’t really make anything in my courses. Yes, they write up their research projects and design (sometimes badly) presentations about political processes, but there’s nothing that they can point to during a job interview in terms of “this solves a problem, and I made it.” And making something is probably the strongest form of active learning possible.

Contrast that experience with the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities, in which participants develop their own businesses with assistance from faculty and graduate students at partnering universities.

Another example: I have a nineteen year old acquaintance who has been selling her music on Bandcamp and her clothing designs on Teespring.* While hordes of college students sit through Econ 101 every year, she’s living it, and she’s probably learning a lot more than all the Zacharys and Melissas who watch cat videos on their iPhones while they sit in the back rows of lecture halls. When she becomes the next Coco Chanel or Oprah Winfrey, they’ll be unemployed.

So one of my goals over the summer is to think of ways that my students can walk away from my courses with a concrete accomplishment.

*I have no financial interest in either of these companies.

Since we’re on the subject of British imperialism, or maybe imperialism in general –

I recently stumbled across this Ted-Ed video on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Watching the video produced a vague sense of dissatisfaction despite the eye-grabbing animation. I decided this deserved additional, more formal exploration, so I evaluated the video using these previously-posted instructional design criteria. So here we go . . .

• Learning objective: greater knowledge about the Ho Chi Minh trail.
• Content: the video is in fact about the Ho Chi Minh trail, but I don’t think it’s as informative as it could be. More on this below.
• Organization and delivery: on its surface the video is logically organized, but at a deeper level it is constructed mainly as a series of facts. Facts are important for “domain knowledge,” but in my opinion their relationship to bigger questions should be more apparent. A reading assignment or lecture would do a better job of explaining why relations between North and South Vietnam “deteriorated” after the 1954 Geneva Agreements, and why North Vietnamese cadre began infiltrating into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail in 1959.
• Practice and application: a multiple choice quiz.
• Assessment and feedback: automated marking of the quiz questions.

At just under thirteen minutes, this Crash Course on decolonization and nationalism is about three times longer than the Ted-Ed video, but it places the Vietnam War (or rather the American War, since the Vietnamese also fought the French for similar reasons) in a much broader context. As a means of providing engaging and rich content — whether to the elementary, high school, or college students — the Crash Course is by far the superior product.

The lesson here is that even though a piece of technology is new and shiny it might not be better than other technologies that are available, and explicit evaluation can help identify why.

This morning, the Guardian produced its new league tables for UK universities, with our School moving to 7th spot, in part on the back of our excellent student satisfaction. To see how our hard work has paid off with this sort of recognition is most gratifying and a real credit to the work of the team. While we have not specifically targeted league tables in our work, it does help us to see that it has a value beyond the intrinsic benefits to our students. It has also underlined the importance of integrating our individual efforts in order to provide an experience that is internally reinforcing and supportive for students.

What one wears for School awaydays…

Indeed, this last point was a key part of our discussions yesterday at a School ‘awayday’, where we were trying to reflect on how ‘good learning & teaching’ is understood by students, by us (as teachers) and by the university. This really helped to open up debate on the different priorities that each group has and the tensions and possibilities which those open up. I’ll come back to those points here in the next few weeks.

However, instead of that, today I’ll share my other news, which is that I am moving to a new post here at Surrey. From September I will become Associate Dean for Learning & Teaching for the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences (yes, I will need a big business card). This will mean taking responsibility for all of the L&T work in the Faculty, supporting both quality assurance and quality enhancement agendas and working more closely with the University.

For me it’s a real opportunity to take some of the great experiences that have been developed here in Politics out to other groups, and to get to work on the more generic issues of learning & teaching. I’ll still be keeping a research foot in the School and I’ll still be contributing here, so I’m not lost to you (however you might feel about that): indeed, I think that this blog has been a good example of what can be achieved when a group of like-minded and motivated individuals decide to make a push. So thanks go to all of you for participating in this.

And with that, I will away, to consider innovative ways to deal with the piles of marking on my desk.

In this case, my students brought packs of candy bars–those packages that contain eight or ten individually wrapped Hershey bars or kit kats or Reeses peanut butter cups.

Each student in the class received a piece of paper with ten countries listed along with their respective GDPs.  The students then distributed the chocolate according to the share of global wealth each ten countries received.  So the top ten received about 60% of the chocolate (about 6 full packs of candy), the next ten 2 packs, and the rest received either individually wrapped chocolate bars, or, as they moved down the line, unwrapped squares or halves of squares.  The last person in the room had about 5 or 6 pieces of paper in his hands, but still only received two chocolates.

It made the abstract idea of inequality quite concrete.  It was 8 pm, after all, and 3 hours into a four hour class.  Chocolate was not only welcome, but quickly becoming necessary.

The students then led a discussion about how the students felt, whether  the wealthy students were obligated to give up some of their chocolate, and how they would convince the wealthy students to do so.  Violence entered the conversation (jokingly) at one point.  Eventually the discussion turned to the real-world implications, and the chocolate was widely shared.

Ultimately it was a rather informal simulation, with no preparation asked and no rules–more of a discussion with props.  But it was highly effective, keeping the students attention and helping them examine their own feelings and then apply them to the topic at hand.

One of my colleagues has her students create games to help them review for exams.  I’m tempted to try having my students all try to create some kind of game or simulation to explore topics in IR to see if they can be as generally effective as these two have been.