The report is launched in connection with a live seminar, which is available to watch afterwards. Read the report here:
Summary
The Swedish National Union of Students, SFS, has conducted a survey to investigate what student unions consider important regarding higher education pedagogy. The questionnaire was answered by 37 student unions from 24 universities. This report presents a summary of the results of the survey, together with a number of recommendations based on the results.
The results of the survey
The student unions were asked what they think can be done to ensure that teaching maintains good quality and contributes to students' learning. In their responses, the student unions address a number of different things that the universities, faculties and departments can do, and five areas consistently emerge regarding this:
- student influence,
- course evaluations,
- higher education education for teachers,
- incentive for merit,
- as well as quality work and quality assurance.
The student unions also indicate several different things that individual teachers can do, where several of the answers relate to the following five areas:
- higher education education,
- design and development of courses and teaching,
- responsiveness,
- communication,
- and course evaluations.
Concerning the design and implementation of the teaching, there is a greater spread of the answers, and not as many student unions who have answered the same things. However, two areas are mentioned more often than others:
- more teacher-led time,
- and campus-based teaching.
Regarding how important different areas are for the quality of education and the prerequisite for conducting good higher education pedagogy, merit assessment of higher education pedagogic competence and quality work are seen as the two most important areas, while examination is the area that most people see as not so important.
On the question of how much or how little different types of assessment contribute to students' learning, work-based education and practice is the form of assessment that the vast majority of student unions consider to contribute to learning, and degree work comes in second place. Group work has received the most even distribution among the answers, while formative examination is the form of assessment on which the least proportion of student unions have an opinion.
All student unions believe that it is important that teachers have formal higher education pedagogy training, and they therefore agree that teachers need to be trained in higher education pedagogy.
The student unions were asked which additional aspects or tools they consider valuable for improving higher education pedagogy at their institution. The two most common answers relate to the following:
- higher education pedagogical competence and training for the teachers,
- as well as qualification and incentives for qualification of pedagogical competence.
Recommendations
At the end of the report, SFS presents a number of recommendations.
Institutions:
- Train teachers in higher education pedagogy.
- Merit and create incentives for higher education teaching competence.
- Improve the work with course evaluations.
The government:
- Funding for higher education teaching excellence.
- Add a government mission.