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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
An excellent practical guide, 14 Feb 2007
Higher education is changing, student numbers are multiplying, and while we might like to teach only by tutorials to five people, it is just not possible. In my time as a lecturer, I have gone from teaching on a programme with an annual intake of 35 to one of 250. Biggs' analysis and very practical advice could not have come at a more crucial time.
Biggs coined the term "constructive alignment" to indicate the way different components of education should support each other - for example, teaching methods and learning outcomes. Somehow in teaching those 250 people we want to motivate as many as possible to engage deeply with the course material, bring about conceptual change not just in the most thoughtful who will engage almost no matter what we do, but in that vast bulk of medium motivated students who can be easily lost or easily gained. For me, thinking about the issues Biggs raises, aligning teaching with assemment, and thinking creatively about both to engage as many students as possible, has been immensely rewarding. Attempts are not always successful of course, but the process of exploring the space of teaching and assessment methods has led me to better places than I was at before.
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9 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
meta-reflection of practical use for the educationalist, 13 Jul 2002
By A Customer
John Biggs is a rare author in the current discussion around quality assurance in HE, in that he is rightly not satisfied with merely quantifiable approaches to quality.
In this book, that may not be easily accessible for the subject specialist without educational qualification, he follows the approach to understand good teaching by its effect: namely, what it gets the students to do or better - to understand, emphasising the necessity of deep learning.
Biggs can teach teaching that leads to development of key skills in students in the process, something which has long been understood in the European tradition the present author has been educated in...
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27 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
Good attempt ultimately little useable substance, 24 Jan 2002
By A Customer
Currently the vogue book on University "learn how to teach courses" (where new universities try to fake academic standards by saying that their lecturers have done a teaching course). Whilst covering many interesting issues of relevance, it fails to discuss them in an honest context of the realities of UK higher education. The egalitarianism of the early chapters means that discussion of how to deal with mixed students of widely differing ranges of abilities in the same teaching program is ignored.
There is an emphasis on thinking and understanding at the expense of knowledge. One could get an impression from the book that knowledge is unimportant to be fetched off the library shelf when needed in employment. This ignores the role of knowledge in expertise. Aquisition of knowledge is still vital even if one argues its relative importance.
Like many books of this nature it fails to ask the fundamental basic question of what do we want education for? It avoids this question and central theme by substituting with the not so useful idea of learning objectives which avoid aswering the central question explicitly. This leads to a lack of overall direction for most courses, or at least honesty about direction.
Where the book really fails is in its lack of appreciation of the constraints and reality in which we teach. Poor resources, externally imposed constraints (eg learning objectives and skills) Institutional assessment regulations (often dictated by QAA idiocy)demands about student recruitment and retention and the demands of professional bodies. Combined these give lecturers little if any freedom to teach well.
It is Biggs analysis of the future of education that really makes the blood boil. The distinction between practitioners and researchers, and where we should ask are these practitioners going to find the time to gain and update their knowledge to sufficient depth to teach in the first place? The university system expansion is already overburdened with new lecturers without the knowledge base to perform adequately, teaching expertise merely provides a excuse to justify their employment and make it appear that institutions have academic quality. The book as a whole is an apology for the fraudulent way in which higher education is currently managed at an institutional level.
The book ultimately represents the destruction of academic values and expertise. It ignores the central and essential ingredient of any good lecturing, the lecturer should know their subject!It is the revenge of the educational psychologist so often justifiably marginalised in the university system in the last century and now because of political decisions given a way to justify their role in the University system.
Read it to know your enemy...
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Probably the best book of its kind, 2 April 2008
John Biggs' book is one of the best of its kind. Many people in universities have yet to catch with their real function in the 21st century, i.e. to encourage and develop student learning in a context where subject 'knowledge' as we know it will rapidly become redundant. This book explains clearly, but with no 'dumbing down' the underlying theory and principles of effective learning. It is a wonderful antidote the, unfortunately, still widely-held belief amongst students and lecturers that 'a lecture is a process whereby the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.'
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