style=”padding-left: 40px”>Fortunately, there is now a case-study one can consider to evaluate the effectiveness of the QAA’s recommendations. The module “Gateway to King’s” was piloted at King’s College London and was designed to introduce all first-year students at King’s to topics which map closely to the QAA’s required themes. The plan was to roll the module out as a compulsory module for all first-year students. However, the module was canned after the pilot. 1657 students were eligible to take the course, 366 enrolled and 42 completed it. I describe the contents of the course in this paper so you can decide for yourself which of the risks I have identified were realised.
I believe the reason the course failed is that the QAA’s recommendations are fundamentally flawed. University students want to be taught high quality content by renowned experts. They do not want bland platitudes about citizenship, regurgitated myths about personality types, or indoctrination in postmodern politics. Nor do students want to pay the opportunity costs of pursuing someone else’s hobby horse. Maths students wish to study maths, music students music, and politics students want to study politics. All students want to learn how to think, not what to think.
Academics should not allow quangos to determine what we teach. Instead, we should pursue academically led curriculum development, guided by the individual research expertise of academics. This is the route to high quality Higher Education.
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