{"id":6228,"date":"2015-02-04T07:40:32","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T07:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6228"},"modified":"2015-02-04T07:40:32","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T07:40:32","slug":"excitement-at-the-nus-sustainability-oversight-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/02\/04\/excitement-at-the-nus-sustainability-oversight-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Excitement at the NUS Sustainability Oversight Board"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Such a good day in London yesterday\u00a0at the NUS, for its <em>Sustainability Oversight Board<\/em>. \u00a0We looked at the NUS sustainability operating\u00a0plan, at various aspects of its\u00a0<em>Responsible Futures<\/em> initiative which is mid-way through its pilot year, and at the forthcoming student sustainability summit. \u00a0Lots of challenging technical issues to address, including where best to place evaluation foci.<\/p>\n<p>I got rather excited\u00a0at one point in reaction to what I though was a tendency to view academics as a\u00a0problem. \u00a0This was not the NUS view, of course, but the notion\u00a0is out there, especially with those trying to sell their own pet ideas and projects\u00a0to universities \u2013 patronising folk pedalling the need for \"innovative pedagogies\" come to mind. \u00a0\u00a0I'm aways unimpressed;\u00a0rather than adopt deficit models, it's surely best to start with the extensive expertise that academics do have. \u00a0Sharing this, has to\u00a0a good way of helping everyone learn \u2013 certainly better than telling established experts that they don't know very much.<\/p>\n<p>I suggested at one point that one way to identify which\u00a0universities to work with might be\u00a0to use\u00a0a 2 x 2 matrix where the axes were:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>National Student Survey (NSS) scores<\/em> (high \/ low) \u2013\u00a0\u00a0<em>green league (GL) position<\/em> ( top \/ bottom).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Whilst this is certainly possible,\u00a0the trouble with this strategy is that the cell: <em>NSS high \/ GL top<\/em> is essentially\u00a0empty, which is\u00a0a point I've made before. \u00a0Why this is continues to puzzle\u00a0me. \u00a0Here are the essential\u00a0questions about this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[1] Why is it that those who do well in the green league, tend to fare badly in the NSS? \u00a0and<\/p>\n<p>[2] Why do those that do well in the NSS, tend to fare poorly\u00a0in the green league.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Question 2<\/em> is the easier to answer: successful national student survey\u00a0institutions don't spend much time attending to the issues that count in the green league, and what they're particularly good at, managing student satisfaction, doesn't <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/01\/\">count<\/a> for much in the league.<\/p>\n<p><em>Question 1<\/em> is much trickier, and admits of multiple possibility: for example, is it because successful green league\u00a0institutions neglect teaching and learning? \u00a0Well, hardly! \u00a0Given that these are the institutions that, generally speaking, go in for ESD and innovative pedagogy, is it perhaps that they're not all that good at it? \u00a0Or are their students somehow indifferent to it all \u2013 despite what HEA \/ NUS surveys tell us?<\/p>\n<p>It's a puzzle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Such a good day in London yesterday\u00a0at the NUS, for its Sustainability Oversight Board. \u00a0We looked at the NUS sustainability operating\u00a0plan, at various aspects of its\u00a0Responsible Futures initiative which is mid-way through its pilot year, and at the forthcoming student...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}