The Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education is a big and, supposedly, serious government initiative to raise the standard and status of educating students compared to research through the active membership of all teaching and support staff.
By September 2000, it actually had less than 2% of teachers as members. With 2,500 out of 130,000 academics, it is hard to see how it is going to promote anything.
The ILT faces a particularly large mountain because it is an initiative replicating much of the work already done very professionally by the Staff and Educational Development Association. Many people have asked why the money and time invested in the ILT were not simply given to the older association.
The usual cynical explanation is a government addiction to creating new initiatives - the need to be seen to do something.
Regardless, the ILT also faces challenges from both the Association of University Teachers, within which there are rumblings about the creation of a stand-alone body, and from the Russell Group of older universities, suspicious of these new ventures.
However, Norman Evans, who has a visiting chair at Goldsmiths College in South London and is the founding member of the Learning from Experience Trust, thinks some good might come of the ILT nonetheless.
The Learning from Experience Trust is in favour of what it says on the box. As Professor Evans explains: "There is no way you can try to improve teaching by sitting lecturers down in a class. It is madness to try. The way teaching will improve is by academics reflecting on their experience."
To get academics to accept the ILT, the founders had to agree a fast track means for people to become members. Under that scheme, teachers have to compile a portfolio proving their knowledge and ability, and working out how they have to improve.
In other words, they will have to reflect on their own experience and best practice to become members, and have to keep reflecting to stay members.
Professor Evans finds that much more interesting than the ILT itself. "I hope desperately it will make a difference - that going through the business will change their perception of students."
Particularly, he hopes academics will take on board from the exercise the fact there is much learned outside the classroom and outside formal education. Admissions tutors will need to accept that lesson for people to get to university without the traditional qualifications.
Evans, Norman. (2001). The Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education; Institutions, Academics and the Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning. Routledge/Falmer. London and New York. £24.99.
