Here’s the big idea: students should be able to move seamlessly between higher education providers, picking up academic credits along the way, to create their own degree package. This beguiling picture of a fully flexible higher education system prompted amendments to the higher education and research bill (pdf) announced by universities minister Jo Johnson.
The government wants the new Office for Students to be given responsibility for monitoring, reporting on, and actively encouraging arrangements for credit accumulation and transfer across the sector. The potential benefits of this for students are championed as greater flexibility in terms of what they study, where and when.
But decades of effort on this front has so far brought only limited success. Currently, students can transfer between institutions, though this almost exclusively only occurs at the end of an academic year. Under full credit transfer, students could switch during the year, taking their completed credits with them. They would pick up their study at the new provider, and then move on again. In theory, they could study concurrently at more than one provider.
Left floundering
There are challenges, though, that need to be addressed, some of which cut to the heart of the principles of higher education. Degree programmes are carefully designed and are tested through approval/validation processes to check they meet the academic standards of the framework for higher education qualifications (FHEQ). Each programme will have intended learning outcomes, which are set out in the programme specification.
The module framework for the programme is designed, with core and option modules, to ensure that graduates meet those outcomes. This is important in the assurance of academic standards, but also for prospective employers to see what the graduate has achieved. With complete flexibility and perhaps no core content, it becomes very difficult to demonstrate the acquisition of attributes and assure academic quality.
There is also an academic challenge for students. Within my own discipline (biosciences), degree programmes are typically designed to be progressive. We aim to bring the students to the forefront of current knowledge during the course of their degree. To achieve this, the students specialise, and each year of study builds on what was studied in previous modules. So the student would need to be very carefully guided in taking modules from one course to another course, to ensure they weren’t left floundering. They may try to study a module for which they have not studied the underpinning subject matter.
And another question needs to be asked, too: how would this affect the process of accreditation by the professional and statutory regulatory bodies? An increasing proportion of programmes are accredited by external bodies with very specific requirements for overall outcomes and standards. Yet within those requirements, higher education providers have flexibility to design the programme structure as best fits their specialisms and pedagogic approaches.
It is difficult to see how a student picking up different modules from different providers would be well-placed to construct a personalised degree that would satisfy the requirements of the Engineering Council or the General Medical Council.
Meeting demand?
When talking to students at my university, one of the biggest challenges they see is in the social aspects. Assuming they are campus-based students, there is a major social upheaval in moving to another university: having just established a set of friendship groups, many students do not wish to start all over again.
Some may be able to move to another university locally or study by distance/flexible learning, but for practice-based subjects, the latter is often not feasible. If they are renting accommodation, again flexibility of location is usually not possible because they may be constrained by contracts with landlords.
If the desire for credit transfer was so strong, one might expect to see that being reflected in current student demand via requests for switching between institutions. At present, the numbers doing so are low (pdf) and mainly occur at the end of year one, where first-year results don’t count towards their final degree outcome.
At the University of Leicester, we have recently developed a large suite of major/minor programmes to run alongside the pre-existing joint degrees. But these are designed to provide a carefully scaffolded programme of study.
Increased flexibility does offer benefits – but under a system in which students have more options to transfer, there may need to be better support and guidance to help them make the right choices for the right reasons.
Students who are switching to a new course or university, or putting together their own programme of study and selecting where they wish to undertake different elements, would need extensive, bespoke guidance. Without this, they risk losing education that is truly of value to them and potential employers.
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