One Big Question (4) 

4. How do we balance the message for students – if they see themselves as customers wanting best value for money, but we also need them to understand their role as students and their personal responsibility to achieve in this respect?

This has been a national conversation running since 2004, since the introduction of fees, what language do you use to express a relationship which isn't as straight forward as supplier/consumer, as this over simplifies the relationship the student enters into when they agree to be jointly responsible for their education.

A key challenge for the HE sector is to get this right from the outset, to cultivate a culture of joint responsibility in learning, rather than an environment where they walk through the door, pay, and are a 'vessel waiting to be filled up.' The best relationship is where there is high quality and thought provoking input from academic staff, which challenges students to consider questions by their own investigation and reasoning. We need to give students the tools to learn so they can expand and develop. Do all professional staff fully understand the nature of that relationship, and have we got the approach right, which says what the relationship is and isn't and what we are trying to achieve? But co-learning is not an excuse to not provide high quality professional education, and the role of
professional staffs is to seek to support the process of co-learning.