Epic fail: you don’t need a teaching degree to teach at university

‘Universities that promote their quality teaching are going to have get serious about teaching’. Picture: iStock

Labor’s Jason Clare says universities are where people “learn new skills, get the qualifications you need to succeed”.

Liberal education spokesperson Sarah Henderson tells universities, “in everything you do, the 1.1 million Australian students you serve must be first and foremost.”

So that’s that – teaching is what universities will need to get right after the election. There’s just one problem. Vice-chancellors don’t do one big thing to make it happen – ensure university teachers are taught how to teach.

Which puts them in a class of their own.

From preschool to high-school and on to skills training, the person in front of a class must, must, have a teaching qualification. But not in universities. The Higher Education Standards Framework, which specifies what universities must do, states that academics should have “skills in teaching, learning and assessment”.

The enforcer, the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency, states the same – which can mean anything a university can convince the regulator it means. For now, Australian academics who want to demonstrate their teaching expertise go through accreditation by the UK-based Advance HE organisation, in the absence of a national standard of our own.

This is ridiculous. And education experts know it. Clare’s blueprint for post-school education reform, the Universities Accord, recommended all higher education teaching staff having teaching qualifications should become the norm.

There is already plenty of work in the space. Every university has its own teaching awards, plus nat­ional ones, although the commonwealth outsourced running them a while back. Discipline communities have programs, there is a bunch happening now in education technology, for excellent AI reasons. And there are all sorts of venues to report research and make cases. Mother superior of the teaching and learning community Sally Kift has run a weekly discussion site, Needed Now in Teaching and Learning, since 2019.

But the vast majority of academics do not have the foundation knowledge and skills that comes from completing a course on how to teach to make the most of all this effort. They do not need to; taking one is not a job requirement.

Mostly academics do OK. The national QILT annual student survey of higher education institutions recently records satisfaction scores with “teaching quality and engagement” in the mid 70s to mid 80s. That is still a fair swag of students who are dissatisfied with what they are paying for. And academics generally less dislike than loathe student evaluations of courses, which can be unkind, to put it mildly, about the teachers.

There was industrial action a few years back when the University of NSW wanted to publish student experience survey results by course.

Yet things are going to get worse for academics who worked out how to teach on the job and are too busy researching to learn how do things differently.

For a start, technology has changed everything. There are outcries whenever a university announces it is cancelling lectures – but a method designed for a world before electricity does not work for students who pick up information in three-minute grabs on their phone and want course content on-demand so they can discuss it with study buddies when it suits.

Lecturers posting screenshots of empty rooms when they arrived for class used to be a meme. Not so much now, perhaps because academics realised it made them look irrelevant. And incomprehensible to many students. Universities were previously for an academic elite, students who hit campus from school running and could work out what academics obsessed with their own expertise meant. This no longer applies across the higher education system. Clare says meeting national skill needs requires expanding undergraduate numbers, and that means many more low socio-economic status students, who will need help learning how to study.

And so universities that promote their quality teaching are going to have get serious about teaching, beyond pointing to self-starters who do one of the few local courses or are accredited by the UK’s Advance HE organisation.

Changing this is going to take a culture shift, probably plus government giving orders. Academics get jobs on the basis of what they know about their discipline, not whether they can explain it to students. They mostly get promoted because they publish articles about their work – vice-chancellors ­really care about international rankings that are based on their universities’ research outputs.

The traditional argument is that researchers make great teachers but that dates from the days when teaching was about reading a script in class or demonstrating how science works.

The problem is that while teaching is now a separate career, young academics taught that research is what matters don’t want to take it up. Just 5 per cent of continuing academics are in teaching-only jobs.

University managements want way more of them, but not necessarily to improve their teaching. The vast majority of academics are now covered by industrial agreements that allocate their time 40 per cent to teaching, 40 per cent to research and 20 per cent to service functions. The more staff teaching and not researching the better so that people not meeting research targets could be sacked as surplus and the money spent where managements really want it to go – increasing the number of research high-performers, now 14 per cent of the workforce. This is not going to happen without a fight at every university that tries it on; few academics want to join the lower status teaching-only caste, which will stay unloved until cultures change.

For now, casuals, employed semester to semester, do much of the teaching but these real specialists don’t have an incentive to do a course, what with their having no guarantee of a job in six months.

Insofar as anything involving change-resistant universities is ever easy, this could be easily fixed – for a start, the next government could appoint experts to create a national diploma course in university teaching and make it mandatory for all teaching staff to complete in yea years. There are a range of government-funded open online courses for school teachers that point the way. Or it could let universities create their own, to be approved by the regulator.

Universities that howled could be asked one question – while they all accept millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars to educate Australians, why do they oppose demonstrating their staff have the teaching skills and are qualified to do it?

The Accord team also has an idea on that, requiring all higher education providers to report how many of their staff are qualified teachers. Could be something ­that people interested to know where they should spend their government funding to do a degree, and their own contribution, would want to know.

Academics who complained they are deeply learned in their disciplines with PhDs and publications to prove it and above such certification could be asked if they think they are better than the trades men and women who must complete a teaching course before being allowed in front of the next generation of skilled workers.

The first vice-chancellor to make mandatory teaching qualifications for academics will set a precedent peers must follow.