What are we looking for as we try to find the path? I have been reading Derek Morrison's post, Towards a generic framework for benchmarking e-learning and the interesting follow up commentaries by Terry Mayes and David Nicol. These posts deal with the interplay between abstractions and the concrete world. This is not just ineffectual theorising. Abstract institutions: e.g. education, religion, the family, or more finly grained ones: e.g. higher education are in constant dialogue with the concrete manifestations of those abstractions.
Custom and practice in higher education is preserved in abstractions and manifested in the concrete. Any representation of an abstraction - that is not an actual concrete institution - is a model. All models are structured reductions of complexity; a model is, of course, simpler than the reality it purports to represent. Benchmarking is a process by which we might decide what to include in our institutional models and what to leave out. This will shape our reality. The principles according to which a model is made dictate what aspects of reality are manifested in the model and which are externalised. Derek argues that the principle that should underlie benchmarking is the student learning experience (SLE). One challenge that faces us is to recognise that formal, front-of-stage assertions of institutional purpose, mission or strategy are models. They reduce and structure reality. A key point, made by Derek, is that a university may be a "complex heterogeneous network of communities". We approached our benchmarking exercise with this as an axiom and are developing our pathfinding ideas around the concept of communities. But this is not exactly the same as the SLE.
At Brookes we are developing a new Student Learning Experience Strategy. What I want to argue is, however, that if we focus solely on the student learning experience, we will not achieve the enhancement of that experience that we so desire. Part of the problem is in our conceptualisation of a "student". While Brookes is not alone in this, we are perhaps more than most, dominated by a model of the student that is 18-21, in full-time education, on the Undergraduate Modular Programme (UMP). Yet we have ambitions to be more than a finishing school. We want to encourage research, widen participation, grow post-graduate study and forge local, regional and international links. Paradoxically, I believe that if we concentrate on the SLE, when our model of a student is an undergraduate, we will not attend to these wider ambitions and, as a consequence, the experience of our undergraduates will suffer.
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