Dr. Greg Foley:

I thank Senator Marie-Louise O'Donnell for the invitation. I teach in DCU. I will come back to that word in a minute or two. I do research and I am also the associate dean so I have a triple mandate. That is a key point. It is not that I am particularly interesting because that is typical of academics within the sector in that they do a lot of things. This takes me to my main point which is that the word "teaching" in a university context is problematic. We are not teachers in the sense of second level teachers. Third level is fundamentally different from second level or at least it should be unless we want to radically change our vision of third level. I agree very much with Professor Mary Gallagher that we do not have a proper vision as to what third level should be.

I said that also in my submission's conclusion. All sorts of stakeholders have differing views. Employers see it as training while many people, in particular students and their parents, see it as an extended form of second level. The Government, in particular the current Government in recent years, has seen it as an engine of economic growth as if that can be separated from its educational brief.

The multifaceted nature of third level education is absolutely key. Although this might get me into a little bit of trouble, I must say that initiatives such as the national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education are fundamentally flawed in that they do not take account of the triple mandate, at least, that an ordinary academic has. Most academics will do some research, some teaching and some administration and they will parcel out those roles slightly differently. Unless we take into account that the culture in third level education is fundamentally different from second level, we will go down blind alleys and eventually we will just try to reproduce what is done in second level at third level. That would be a real shame. That is my basic premise.

I do not know what it is that we do. We do not just lecture. I do laboratory modules, tutorials and a lot of active learning in the classroom so I am not just a lecturer, but I do not think of myself as a teacher. If one looks at the key difference between third level and second level education, it is the role played by independent learning. A typical module in the STEM disciplines will have four hours of independent learning for every hour of contact. That is radically different from second level so when one hears various stakeholders, politicians included, making statements about the lack of contact time, they are misunderstanding third level education. An educator in the third level sector guides somebody, charts a course through a subject for him or her and perhaps explains things and is there to support the student. He or she inspires and motivates students but he or she is not a teacher. We really have to get that into our heads.

I agree with Professor Mary Gallagher that there is a teaching and learning industry out there. I heard somebody refer to it as the "T and L-aliban", a sort of take on the Taliban. There is a culture of fear that if one does not adopt what are student-centred methods, one will get very poor reviews from students.

SIPTU did a recent survey in DCU where some staff actually felt bullied by students because the demands were so great. I frequently answer e-mails at night from students. In my kitchen this morning, while eating my Shreddies, I was answering e-mails from students on my telephone because they have an examination tomorrow. It has become very student-centred. The table in page two of my submission shows the enormous administrative load that lecturers are under between student surveys of teaching and student reps. Next week, I will be inundated with students coming to my office to look at exam scripts to get feedback and for me to justify my marks. We have annual programme reviews, periodic programme reviews, quality reviews, professional reviews and we have tracking systems for students. Anyone who says that teaching and learning is not taken seriously at third level is seriously wrong. In fact, I think that so far we have created a dependency culture and that is not good.

I will depart from what I was going to say and refer to the drop out rates because it came up last week. It relates to some of the things Professor Mary Gallagher said. The HEA produces reports on drop out, although I should not say "drop out". They are non-progression rates because the students come back into the system. The only single metric one can use to predict drop out is what is called prior academic achievement. The courses that have high drop out are low point courses. We are taking people into demanding courses who are just not academically up to it. They have got such low points that they are probably getting their seventh, eighth or ninth choice, so they have picked the wrong course because they are academically on the weaker end of the spectrum.

One of the issues that has come up through the forum is whether university lecturers should have a formal qualification in teaching. My own opinion is "No". It would nice to know a little more cognitive science, for example, but it is something that is a "nice to do" rather than a "need to do".

It does not take into account the fact that if the culture of a university values research, having an educational qualification or continuing professional development will degenerate into box ticking. Somebody will do a postgraduate diploma and use whatever means they can to get promoted. Usually, the quickest way to do this is to excel at research.

The fundamental barrier to improving teaching is the fact it is very difficult to measure the quality of teaching. Good teaching is defined as that activity which improves student learning. However, there are many ways to do this. The two best lecturers I ever had in my career were Frank MacLoughlin at UCD, who has retired, and someone at Cornell University. One used an overhead projector and the other used a blackboard and chalk. They were inspirational and fantastic teachers. My fear is that the teaching and learning industry will generate into ideology, as it has with Ofsted in the UK, and that if one is not teaching in a certain student-centred way, it will be perceived as not being dedicated to teaching. I have a real fear of this. I know many very good lecturers who do not do anything particularly innovative and are not visible as excellent teachers. They may be excellent researchers but they teach very well in the background and are not making a song and dance about it.

Cuts to higher education funding have been ongoing. I am an engineer. I tend to be a bit of a nerd with data and I go back and look at things. The cuts in higher education preceded the global financial crisis. They date back to 2006 at least. There has been a mindset among policymakers that, for whatever reason, higher education, university education and third level education should not be funded to the same extent as primary and second level education. This is a mindset issue. It is particularly visible in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, disciplines. I find it quite difficult to understand how this disconnect occurs. Last October or November, the Government launched its capital investment plan, Building on Recovery, to run to 2020. In this it pledged to spend €27 billion, including an increase in funding for research, innovation and job creation from €2.9 billion to €5 billion by 2020. Included in this is an expectation to increase PhD numbers by 30% and postdoctoral researcher numbers by 30%. At the same time, it committed €110 million to higher education. These figures make no sense because the pipeline for research and innovation and for those PhD students is their undergraduate education, particularly their experience in undergraduate laboratories.

There is a crisis in terms of the funding of laboratories in every institution. This will probably get me into trouble because I am saying something that does not reflect well on us. However, I say it because it is typical of the sector. I brought a panel of biopharma people around our laboratories as part of a quality review. They were very complimentary and stated that we do great work. When I brought them to one particular laboratory, there was an audible gasp when they saw how out of date the equipment was. Much can be done with very little in education and we can still teach the basics but laboratories throughout the country use equipment connected to computers which look like they were built by Alan Sugar in the 1980s. There is a real crisis. I find extraordinary the disconnect between the rhetoric of the knowledge economy and willingness to fund the grassroots. I do not quite understand why it is the case. It is like in sport where people suddenly decide to put millions into elite athletes, as was done in England for cycling. Doing so wins gold medals but meanwhile the grassroots die. This is a real danger here. The CAO preferences for science and applied science have been dropping since 2013.

I have a feeling we have been operating in a science bubble and that, as the economy picks up, we will see a lack of interest in science. People think this will go on for ever and we will have all of these PhD graduates. However, what if we do not provide an undergraduate experience of having well-equipped laboratories? I am not stating that everything has to be off the shelf or the latest model but it must be better than 1990s equipment. Unless we commit to this, no number of foreign students - or any other methods universities are trying at present - will solve the capital investment problem. We are addressing it in DCU. I will not say how we are getting the money but people probably know. We are actually doing it because it has come to a stage where we must. We can longer teach laboratory courses, which are a big part of STEM education, unless there is serious investment. The greatest crisis affecting the higher education system is that we are not putting in capital investment. It must be a rolling plan. There must be a commitment every year in every budget that X million will be spent on higher education.

I truly believe third level education is about a partnership between the lecturer or educator and the students. I love my job. I love working with students. It keeps me young. I gave a tutorial yesterday and it was just good fun. There are times when it is really good fun and I really like students. There is a problem in that the nature of modern culture is such that students find it very difficult to put in the graft required. I feel quite aggrieved if I am criticised or assessed on the basis of a vision of third level education which presumes I should behave like a secondary school teacher. Students must play their part. If we look at the Irish survey of student engagement, the results of which are on page 6 of my submission, approximately 45% of students do fewer than five hours of independent study per week. This is bad in the STEM subjects but it is even worse in the humanities where students need to do a lot of reading. One could not read a single book in a week with that level of study. We have a cultural problem as well as a funding problem and various other issues.

To go back to what Professor Gallagher stated, we need a conversation on what third level is supposed to be. In saying this, I fear we would end up with a talking shop whereby everybody would just give their tuppence worth and matters would go nowhere. Everybody is probably aware of the Growing Up in Ireland survey, which is fantastic and which has informed child development. We need something like this for education. We could do it very quickly because those involved in the Growing Up in Ireland survey have done it. From 2017, we could track 10,000 students. It can be done. We have a very good track record in Ireland for doing this. They could be followed over the next ten or 20 years. Let us begin to use evidence to inform our education policy because it is dominated by anecdote, hearsay and the experiences of people who went to college 30 years ago. We spend so much that we need this database. This is my big suggestion.