The role of the lecturer

Here, the function of the position lecturer is discussed from the two perspectives at UC Berkeley and at U of Borås and especially the engineering education view is reflected upon. The definition and todays’ usage are a bit different but the intention with the position is quite similar. There has for a long time being discussed about the importance of lecturers and how they will be placed in research universities (I limit here the discussion to the case where there is both research and undergraduate/graduate education). A lecturer here is a person who is fully (or almost fully) devoted to teaching at the university but that may or may not have other duties outside the university. I will here focus on the persons who are fully employed by the university mainly because in general it is difficult to have a long term commitment with people working part-time with short-term contracts if they should be in a leading position for developing new courses or programs. There is a special need for those as well but it should be in more special cases such as a special course, a period where there is a lack of other staff, and to cover sudden increases in the work load.

The discussion will cover the purpose of the lecturer as such but also its usefulness and validity in the main courses of the program. There is a difference in the undergraduate education as noticed in an earlier blog post where UC Berkeley use 4 years undergraduate program and U of Borås only uses 3 (which is in line with the Bologna process) but both system face nevertheless the same type of fundamental structure regarding core courses in the main subject and who is eligible of its education and teaching. To make it comparable I use the word major to define the program content whether it is in the US or in Sweden.

Situation today

Univeristy of Borås, which is a university that has been heavily depending on the undergraduate education but more and more goes into research, several different teaching positions are used. The main teaching is performed by either lecturers or adjuncts. A lecturer has in general a doctoral degree and fulfills some other requirement as well regarding courses in pedagogy etc. It is possible to weigh in working experience and especially development and creation are emphasized. The adjuct position reflects a person without a PhD degree but with a working experience from outside the university (and as a general rule have at least a master’s degree). Both positions are mainly focusing on teaching but the lecturer position may have time devoted for research or professional development. Specifically, if a lecturer has reached the rank of docent (docent degree), more research is expected. Both the lecturers and adjunct positions are tenure positions in the sense that they are long-term contracts (permanent employment). In addition to the adjucts and lecturers is the research faculty with the professors (associate or full professors) that are included in teaching. General a professor has 50% teaching in the employment which also includes supervision of students. 

At UC Berkeley, the lecturer position is mainly used for people from industry with a PhD degree that is teaching on the undergraduate level to bring in the industrial perspective on the education. They are in general persons with long experience in industry and they only work part-time as teachers and are only contracted for one semester at a time. At the chemical engineering department, there are also a couple of lecturers which are full time employed and they have special assignments necessary for the undergraduate education. However, it is in a transition period whether these positions should merge into tenure (long-lasting) positions or not. The main teaching has been performed by the research faculty but a declining number of these positions in combination with a steady increase in number of students have led to the change and the introduction of more lecturers. The research faculty generally has one course every semester which means that they are involved in teaching all year around for the academic year (the courses are semester based in length).

Purpose of education

First; often one intends to put the student in focus in all discussion. This is fine in the sense of that the student is the product but it has to be taken at a higher level. The focus should above all be “Why do we educate the students?” and “What purpose should they fulfill?”. We have to make sure that every student that comes in will get the best possible education but that education should fill a purpose and it is a multipurpose education we have. It is multipurpose in the sense that we need to cover many needs; it is the need of trade and industry; it is the need for research to develop the coming products/processes; it is the need for universities to teach new students and to perform research; it is the need for the society to have people who can contribute (e.g. to tax, to welfare, to industry, to university, to joy and to development);  and it is the need for the student who want to get a good future (interesting job, well paid or whatever reason they have).

Each of these purposes has their own list of things the student should be able to do after graduation and it is not possible to meet them all at once. What we can do is to make sure that the student who is graduating can assimilate necessary knowledge in a short time and then become productive at whatever area he or she chooses. However, the more of the specific knowledge needed for a particular branch that is incorporated in the product (i.e. the student) the better it is for those receivers in that area (it is not uncommon that there is a need in industry to hire new staff but there is just not time to train them which leads to that the company may be short-staffed for longer time than necessary). However, it is not the role of the university to target each and one of all industries (who knows what the need might be tomorrow if a new company gets started) but we have to make sure that the time needed before the new employed is useful is as short as possible regardless of where they end up and that they are attractive on the market. 

Following this strategy it is possible to set up a couple of rules for the undergraduate teaching and then see if they are consistent with the lecturer position (this is by no means a full coverage but serves its purpose in the following discussion):

1)      Students should have a necessary base knowledge in matters important to society (solved by breadth courses on a general level)

2)      Students should have base knowledge in matters important to industry (core courses in each major)

3)      Students should have base knowledge in matters important to research (core and elective courses)

4)      Students should have knowledge in matters important for their own growth (all courses)

5)      Students should know how to get new information

6)      Students should know how to be critical and how to judge information   (only possible when the other rules are fulfilled)

Based on these rules, I cannot see a major problem of having dedicated teachers providing the base knowledge in the core courses. In fact, I can see a number of positive effects with this approach especially since the number of faculty are decreasing.  We really should use our researchers in smaller classes where it is possible to better emphasis critical thinking and discussion about the meaning of the different subjects. This will be important for the students and will definitely mark that the research faculty is highly involved in the growth and progress of the students. This will be an edge of the education and something I find necessary in the harder competition about the best students among the universities. It is in line with the question of how to motivate students to campus when there are so good on-line opportunities (such as regular courses or MOOC).

 

My view upon full using lecturers

I support the idea of having a couple of professors/lecturers fully dedicated to teaching:

1)      A person fully dedicated to teaching will easier be aware of what is happening in this particular area (education) and can thus act as a bridge between this discipline and the other research faculty

2)      Most of the undergraduate teaching does not demand that you are at the research front in fact the model used today let researchers teach courses which could be far away from their own research area so the connection is still very weak.

3)      You will get more stability and can follow the course impact during several years. Therefore it is easier to plan following courses and to implement parts in the earlier courses where the whole curriculum is in focus.

This will imply for most of the cases that it will be on the core courses because:

1)      They are the most general courses

2)      If there are to be a sustainable and continuous course development there has to be a longer commitment to the course

3)      I assume that most of the elective courses are derived based upon the research interest at the faculty and they should be closer to the research front

 

Important issues

1)      Do not move the power of the course curriculum and overall course content from the research faculty. There must be an “application” to do any major changes or a number of minor changes to the faculty committee responsible for the chemical engineering program and this must be approved before implemented. Note that this does not impact the style of teaching and how the individual lectures are structured etc. but it controls the overall content in the course. On a higher level this is evaluated by some evaluation authority within each discipline but these evaluations are not done so frequently and leave plenty of room for individual interpretations.

2)      Make sure that there is a link between the research faculty and their view of what the student should know in each area and the lecturer who is forming the foundation of that vision. This could for example be thermodynamics, differential equations, unit operations, mathematical modeling etc.

3)      Chemical engineering is a profession education and we need to keep the strong connection to the profession. This implies a good contact with people working outside the university. I think there is a very good opportunity for the process design course where it is possible to have teachers with industrial experience that is responsible for the course. If it is not possible to engage industrial experienced people to take a course responsibility at least it should be possible to have them coming for a couple of lectures and to be part of the oral review and presentations. Other interactions are study visits or company fares (possible on the university campus).

Transition of the lecturers as of today

The way lecturer mainly are used today is to: cover up for the teaching which would be difficult to perform otherwise; deliberate research faculty to have more research oriented and elective courses which are beneficial for the students and where the faculty professor (tenure/ladder etc.) can make a real contribution and have more peer-to-peer interaction; and finally to bring in competence not easily found among the university teachers (the trade and industrial aspects). In Sweden, the position is either a part of the academic ladder or a position dedicated for teaching. The amount of teaching is depending on other assignments or possibilities of attracting funds for research.

Remember why these people are hired. Today many of these lecturers (or adjuncts) are present because they have experience from industry and thereby bring in this perspective. However, if they are at the university for an extended period their information becomes more and more outdated and the question is if they provide the wanted competence initially looked for. 

This picture must thus be changed with the implementation of tenure lecturers and the transition will be noticeable. Initially, there will be a need for national (or international?) advertising of lecturers to these positions which will be a good window of promoting this idea of the educational system and also a good way to really attract the persons needed for these positions.

The lecturer would not be on short-term contracts but rather on a stable tenure position. I envisage that with full time teaching I include time for course preparation and course development as well as being in the front line of what is going on in the educational area from a research perspective. However, I think there is another twist that must be considered. What kind of career is this position associated with? To me, I think it should be possible to do a similar career as the ladder ranked professors (but it takes longer time to achieve the necessary progress in the research area) by including a small portion of the lecturers’ appointment as dedicated to be involved in one of the research groups (see figure). It will not be enough to lead an own research group but still enough to be involved in supervision of graduate students and own research projects (maybe more heavily pronounced in times outside the academic year). To get a good usage of the time and resources I firmly believe that there must be incorporation in existing research groups (but with an attractive offer to these groups regarding financing so they will be view as an asset already from start).

Figure 1. Transition of the situation today to the challenges of tomorrow. Note that the amount of teaching represented by the green area is equal in the two cases. In this particular example, 6 part-time lecturers is replaced by 3 full time-lecturers.

Practice

The question of how to incorporate the lecturers will be a discussion mainly for the UC Berkeley case because at U of Borås the positons are already in place since long. The lecturer must be responsible to present the courses and the idea behind larger changes to the research faculty (or the portion of those who are responsible for the development of the chemical engineering program). It is important that in each of the stages that there is a discussion between the content in the core courses, they learning outcomes and an evaluation of the student’s ability to master the senior elective courses. This involves a direct link between the lecturer and the research faculty in the elective courses where the program board could serve as a mediator to ensure that all qualities are included and where they would best fit in.

In the same manner, there must be an increased exchange with the industry (possible this could be done via the alumni association) where the demands (wishes) are explained and then evaluated and hopefully incorporated. I see this as more possible to perform if there are full time lecturers than with the situation existing today.

 

Conclusion

It is obvious that regardless of the US or the Swedish system, there is a need for lecturers at higher academic level. They could be more or less involved in research but their main emphasis is in teaching and education. The system existing in Sweden (at University of Borås) emphasizes the necessity of performing teaching  by using the same name for the faculty dedicated for a research career as well as for the faculty devoted for full time teaching. Problem here is that it can give mixed signals about the position and what the intention with the position is. It is definitely a heritage of the origin of the university where teaching has been in the front line for a long time but recently more emphasis is made into research. As a function of this history, there has been a need for stable position of the lecturers at the university with a number of different options for motivate the staff to stay and perform their duty. On the other hand, UC Berkeley have its main focus on research but at the same time the necessity of performing excellent undergraduate teaching is prominent. In both system, there is a place and a need for persons devoted for teaching with challenges of how to make the positions incorporated into the current structure and with development possibilities for the employers.