Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent)
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I do not know where to start. I will ask one general question to Mr. Boland. Does he believe there would be a place to write a national strategy for higher education about teaching at third level? Based on my reading of the National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030, we seem to have this fear to align it independently to what it is. It is consistently aligned to research. Of course, it has to come out of that in so far as no one will be teaching without any background. As a discipline and as the way forward in third level education, it is the only one. It is certainly one of the major ones.

I can see that there has been great progress because at one stage there was research and administration, which was at the lowest end of the scale in terms of priorities. The HEA has made great progress in this respect. Would it be possible to write a strategy about teaching? What does the Higher Education Authority consider to be great qualitative teaching at third level? That is the real question. It does not obfuscate itself in massive qualitative, creative, ethereal answers that go on for pages. What university or third level institution is responding to this challenge in an interesting, creative, imaginative and different way?

Much of the research in the document is taken from the Carnegie Foundation, or other organisations from Boston or elsewhere in the United States. Do we have our own research? I am aware that Áine Hyland and others work very closely, but they come from teacher-training backgrounds.

What has the Higher Education Authority done to insist that anybody who walks in the door to an undergraduate or postgraduate class has an actual teaching qualification and not something set up by the HR department, which is some kind of a course given by somebody with an overhead projector? Under this approach there is no difference between teaching nine-year olds and 19-year olds. All that changes is the level of the information and the fact that one wants students to continue learning themselves. One expects that from a nine-year old as well.

I taught in third level for a long time. I remember armies of people setting themselves up in third level as the teaching and learning unit. Some of them had never stood in front of a classroom containing, 30 students, 14 postgraduates or 55 undergraduates.

They were throwing out verbs like "understand", "relate", "quality" and "add". It was interminable but nothing was done.

As I am fearful about that, I will revert to my major question to the HEA which Mr. Boland may be able to answer. Does he think someone could write the strategy for teaching and what is meant by it? While many papers have been written about it, I am talking about something far more generic off which to bounce. Where does the HEA see the arts within third level education? I am not talking about the music departments in UCD or in UCC run by the great Kellys but about where the HEA sees them fitting in within third level education. They appear to be disappearing as greater numbers of economists are engaged. We are rolling over - tummies in the air - and getting them scratched by every banker, economist, technology person or great computer person who walks in the door. We are all rolling over. Where does the HEA envisage universities having a role to play in the breakdown of the apartheid in education between apprenticeships and how a university perceives itself? I do not include the VECs in this as I believe some of them are the finest universities in Ireland. I acknowledge these are big concepts and thank Mr. Boland, who might try to answer some of my questions.