By: Ronald M. Harden
In a plenary presentation at the PHIE CIIPES Conference in Brazil in June 2024, I critiqued the use of university rankings as a valid assessment of excellence. The metrics used by The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are 24% teaching, 28% research, 30% citations, 8% international outlook and 10% industry income. The 24% teaching covers 10% teaching reputation, 4.5% staff-to-student ratio, 2% doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio, 5% doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio, and 2.5% institutional income. I argued that a more appropriate measure of excellence in a university would be an assessment of the extent to which students were engaged in their learning.
The importance of students’ engagement in their learning has been established. As noted by Kahu (1): “Student engagement is a current buzzword in higher education, increasingly researched, theorized & debated with growing evidence of its critical role in achievement & learning.” Fredricks et al. state “There are historical, economic, theoretical, and practical reasons for the growing interest in student engagement” (2). Kahu suggested that student engagement can be used as a proxy measurement for quality.
A course at the Asia Pacific Medical Education Conference (APMEC) 2025 in Singapore on Key Ideas for Teachers & Trainers in the Health Professions (HP-KITT) which I’m running with my daughter Jeni Harden, a Professor at University of Edinburgh Medical School, has as a theme Students’ engagement in their learning, with three stages: interest the student; a commitment to learning; and facilitation of learning. We describe how one feature of outcome-based education is a commitment by students to their learning.
Spady, the father figure of outcome-based education, set out four requirements (3):
- The learning outcomes are identified, made explicit and communicated to all concerned.
- Decisions about the education programme and what is taught are based on the agreed learning outcomes.
- There is a move from a time-based to a competency-based education programme: a move from time fixed and standards variable to standards fixed and time variable.
- A commitment from teachers that students will succeed and a commitment from students that they will learn.
While much attention has been paid to the first three requirements for outcome-based education, relatively neglected has been the role of students and the need for a faculty-student partnership in implementing a competency-based approach. Over the last year I thought a lot about the increasing attention paid to the role of students as partners in the learning process. I wrote about this in the book I co-authored with Jeni, The Changing Role of Medical Students (4). We wrote about the student’s role as a teacher, a curriculum developer, a facilitator of learning, an assessor and a manager of the learning process. In retrospect we should have paid more attention to the student’s role in outcome-/competency-based education.
The availability of a set of learning outcomes empowers the student to facilitate their own learning program. They can identify how best to achieve the expected competencies by collaborating in the alignment of the teaching and learning methods and the assessment of the specified competencies.
About the Author:
Ronald Harden is Editor-in-Chief of Medical Teacher and Professor Emeritus in Medical Education at University of Dundee, UK. An option for the image as the theme is about student engagement would be to have our book on the topic, image below. You may feel this is too promotional so I will leave it to you.
References (Many references came from a fantastic CCC supplement from JGME found here: https://meridian.allenpress.com/jgme/issue/13/2s):
- Kahu ER. Framing student engagement in higher education. Studies in Higher Education. 2013 Jun;38(5):758–73.
- Fredricks JA, Blumenfeld PC, Paris AH. School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence. Review of Educational Research 2004 Jan 1;74(1):59–109.
- Spady, 1994, Outcome-based Education: Critical issues and answers. American Association of School Administrators, USA 1994
- Harden J, Harden RM. The Changing Role of Medical Students 2024, Elsevier, 2024
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