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The interesting thing now is if you Google 'HEAR'. You
start to get higher education achievement report stuff. 18
months ago you would have got hearing awareness for rockers
and stuff like that but now and a lot of institutional
websites, Sheffield, Swansea, Leister, Gloucestershire
obviously. So there is quite a bit of data out there and
there is a UK website hear.ac.uk which provides some of the
core information.
Sheffield has a model for the HEAR which
is involved a project with student's union
funded staff and the academically funded
staff working together to document and decide what to
recognise in terms of what students actually do. Whether
it's part of their student's union activities or more
widely. Sheffield has an award the ‘Sheffield Graduate
Award’ but it also has a whole range of other activities
not covered by this or students might do one element of the
award so they don't qualify for the whole thing but they
can still get recognition for that. So it's been
documenting and agreeing what would constitute a threshold
for inclusion in the HEAR and it's important to say two
things about that really. One it's very much a threshold model
as is much of the HEAR work in the UK. It's a partnership
model which has been quite interesting between the
university and the student's union and it's also emphasised
an institutional commitment so if you look on the Sheffield
HEAR website you'll see all sorts of reasons why this makes
sense in institutional terms. It's linked to graduate
attributes but it's not dominated by graduate attributes.
The graduate attribute stuff at Sheffield provides the
backdrop for the HEAR development but the emphasis is on
individual achievement in context and that maybe is a bit
different from a model that says 'let's have some standards
let's try and do it through the curriculum let's try and
give a level to students performance.' I don't think we're
trying to do that as clearly in the HEAR and the employers
we've spoken to about that are broadly comfortable because
they are interested in appraising achievement in context as
opposed to thinking about a level of achievement that may
or may not be replicated in another context.
The third one. Let's take the University of Leeds. Leeds
didn't start out with the HEAR they started out with an
initiative called 'Leeds for Life.' 'Leeds for Life' is
around trying to present to students the potential for life
wide engagement while they’re students are at the
university. Whole ranges of initiatives and some tutorial
opportunities for discussion with a member of staff
periodically for a very limited amount of time how that is
working out and what else they can do. The HEAR has started
to be nested inside that initiative so the HEAR provides a
context for the university to recognise some of that
process of wider engagement but not necessarily all of it.
That's an example of really the HEAR Gloucester the HEAR
has been a catalyst for institutional thinking and in Leeds
the HEAR has fitted into existing institutional thinking.
So it's kind of come along at different phases of
development but it has the potential in both cases to kind
of sharpen up the nature of what the institution wants to
pay attention to in terms of student development.
Yeah well it depends where you go. I think one of the
things that where the HEAR has been quite important and I
think there are some places where it's simply a document
being developed by registry at the moment but the trend is
away from just doing that. Largely because employers said
'if you give students a document when they leave' not quite
'don't bother' but they said 'it's too late.' Particularly
if you give them a document and they don't know what it is
it's certainly too late. It needs to be built up. We're
recruiting from the end of the first year almost in terms
of interns in terms of people on placements. We'll be
looking at those sorts of potential employees. It's the
ideal model we've discovered. The model that really has
some traction is kind of an alliance of people who don't
necessarily normally meet. So registry or student records
people, IT services because they're key to this and careers
the learning and teaching community, student's union maybe
some employers for feedback. So the notion of a task and
finish group with some senior management support which gets
those people together to talk about how to make this work
from day one when the student arrives via the student
portal or via an external cloud based provider so that
students can make that information as it becomes available
accessible to third parties or can use it themselves to
think about how their academic and wider university career
is developing. You need all those agents in that mix. It's
fair to say that the involvement of academic staff has been
I suspect relatively limited in the first phase but if you
look at the Sheffield website you'll find quite clear
emphasis in part of that on academic staff contribute to
student thinking and student development and I think that's
going to be increasingly important as we go forwards.
I think it depends I mean again I think there's a variety
of perspectives on that. I'm sure in some institutions
awards have been a way of meaning the curriculum doesn't
necessarily have to engage with some of these issues. The
other side of that is what co-curricular activities have in
their favour is they tend to happen in less controlled
environments, richer environments. Environments where the
staff as it were haven't prepared everything, don't know
where the student is going and I think part of what the
implication of that is we're quite interested in following
up is how we develop greater potential for risk taking in
the curriculum how we refine our curriculum thinking so
that curricular alignment while it's important is not the
be all and end all and actually for students that kind of
break out of the curricular framework or come out with new
insights or ideas. We need to celebrate that because the
world they are living in and going to live in and work in
in the future is going to be characterised by uncertainty
and rapid change and therefore the past is not necessarily
the only guide to the future.
It's a question that's often raised, sometimes it’s raised in the
context of portfolios. My sense of it is it's actually
easier to do it than it is to fake it because it's quite
hard to make up an internally consistent portfolio if you
haven't actually carried through the sets of actions that
the portfolio relates to and that is true for a lot of the
awards actually because they are often portfolio based.
There are some checks and balances in the context of the
HEAR so even though system like Gloucester's where it's
about student claims in respective achievement there is a
requirement for external third party endorsement. There’s
very often some external evidence that forms part of that
claim and in every case in every institution there is a
quality assurance mechanism attached to these systems.
Institutions would not be prepared to go down this route
unless there was some quality insurance mechanisms attached
to these systems. The challenge I think is to make those
robust without making them overbearing because if they are
overbearing we won't do it for the many and actually I
think part of the challenge in some of these systems is to
make them available to the many rather than to the few.