Since I joined UAL as a T&L Technician, organising and planning the technical teaching sessions has been challenging. My team’s technical teaching staff (excluding workshop technicians[1]) consists of only two people for over 300 students across five courses and ten different year groups. Our approach to planning the technical delivery for each term/unit is based on a “first come, first served” system. This means that the academic staff who are more organised for each unit will have their technical delivery arranged first. I’m not saying this is the perfect approach, but it has been the one that has worked best so far. However, some academic staff members have recently argued that this approach is ineffective for them and that there should be more flexibility to adjust sessions already planned to accommodate later requests from other units. The arguments given to justify priority on dates over other already-booked sessions have been:
- The courses with more students should have priority over the smaller ones.
- A ‘formal teaching’ session for a group should be given priority over 1-1 support tutorials for other groups.
I believe that if you ask every course or unit leader, they will likely respond that their students should be prioritised. This debate over who should be prioritised opens a very interesting discussion. For example, do certain students have more rights than others to be prioritised? Is a ‘formal teaching’ session more important than a day of one-on-one support tutorials? Does a group of 60 students take priority over a group of 16? Who should come first, MA, BA, or Graduate Diploma students? How can one choose which students should be prioritised? In an ideal world, this would not be necessary. But sadly, being understaffed means that some students will be affected by not being a priority in some way. It’s important to have specific guidelines that facilitate the entire teaching-learning process and better to plan before the start of the course when it can involve a full teaching team (Ramírez, 2022).
In my opinion, the approach of the “first come, first served” basis is less harmful to students, as this approach allows for better planning because there is more time to prepare materials and do the lesson plans. chunking and pacing content, designing a schedule of assignment due dates and setting a regular schedule for activities makes progress easier for students and teachers. (Rapanta, 2020). As I mentioned, I understand this is not a perfect system, which raises the question of whether students with less organised unit leaders should suffer the consequences of poor planning.
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and as far as I know, UAL doesn’t have guidelines or protocols for addressing this situation. I think it is important to start having conversations about this and try to find a less harmful way to plan technical teaching for so many groups with a very small technical team.
References:
Ramírez Vásquez, N. (2022) ‘From planning to delivering lessons: getting the basics right’, Times Higher Education. Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/planning-delivering-lessons-getting-basics-right
Rapanta, C. (2020) ‘A guide to effective digital course design and delivery from four online teaching experts’, Times Higher Education. Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/four-online-teaching-experts-effective-digital-course-design-and-implementation
[1] I’m not including workshop technicians in this debacle because their teaching schedule and role differ from those of the T&L technicians, who are not based in a specific space.