Professionals in education

Anna-Maria Raudaskoski

Olli Silvén.

Across the nation, the University of Oulu has won acclaim for educational quality, for a record-breaking proportion of national Centre of Excellence nominations and for investments in university pedagogy. A sentiment most of us would agree with is “we know our business”.

From this vantage point, it is interesting to note how our international students rate us. After all, they tend to have experience from more than one university.

In engineering jargon, international students provide us with a measurement standard, against which we can calibrate our performance. With the motive to improve our activities, we participated in the International Student Barometer (ISB) survey collecting feedback on our performance. Conducted in 2010 - 2012, more than 200 institutes of higher education, most of them from Europe and Australia, took part in this survey.

As it turns out, international students consistently give us top marks for infrastructure (including campus facilities, laboratories, libraries and accommodation). Moreover, satisfaction with our student services seems to grow in step with our development efforts.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to be taken aback by the assessment of staff performance. In terms of teaching quality or study counselling, we are no competition. Time and again, we find ourselves at the bottom of the totem pole.

Thus, the ISB survey failed to show any signs of our much touted pedagogical standards. We may, naturally enough, try to convince one another that there was something wrong with the measurement method. On the positive side, results of the survey indicate that our teaching quality has not declined either. Then again, there is not much room for movement on that side of the scale.

Be that as it may, the most lenient explanation for the survey result is that there is a great contrast between student expectations and reality. Even the less than ideal language skills of some teachers may have played a part here. The least charitable interpretation, on the other hand, is that a real quality difference exists between our international programmes and those that the students have previous experience of.

And here are two corollaries: how good is the quality of the education we offer in Finnish, and is there valid evidence for our claims?

Lack of comparable data will be rectified by the national student experience survey launched in May 2013. Target groups for this survey are those who have completed their Bachelor’s degree in 2012 and those who have studied for three years on a programme in which no Bachelor’s degree is awarded.

We can only hope that there’ll be no nasty surprises. At least, the survey provides a new international measurement standard. It is based on CHE Quest, an Analysis Tool for Diversity Management at Higher Education Institutions, which is being used by a number of institutions in the Netherlands and Germany. No doubt, the opportunity to make comparisons will awaken the media.

In another twist to the tale, the Ministry of Education and Culture is factoring student feedback into the university funding model. This will surely goad universities toward raising the pedagogical competence of teaching staff and to compare educational practices and cultures. And make no mistake, best practices will be copied and shared.

As a by-product, the national survey can be expected to shed light on our ISB mystery. The explanation may turn out to be the “parallel academic reality” of international students, but even the reverse result would not project a more professional image of the university.

Olli Silvén
Vice-Rector for Education