New APPS

Next week, I will be teaching my first tutorials at Oxford University (the subject is philosophy of cognitive science). For those unfamiliar with the format, tutorials are one of the forms of teaching at Oxford that every undergraduate has. A lecturer and a student (or a small group of students, maximum 4) convene every week, and the student is guided and gets intensive feedback on the fruits of their independent study. A common procedure is that the student writes a brief paper each week, which they present at the start of the tutorial. The tutor suggests further reading, urges the student to think and to read on the basis of what they have said. There is no lecturing as such going on – it is rather a form of guided self-study. 

Tutorials are sometimes misunderstood as a form of hand-holding or spoon-feeding the student, but in fact the format encourages independence and responsibility. The student has to make sure to do all the reading, digest it, and be able to do the final exam on the basis of it. As it's one-on-one (up to four) it is hard to hide and resort to shortcuts instead of actually doing the reading and the thinking. Tutors get support and training in how to guide students on the right track if they slack or lose motivation; timely interventions make sure the attrition rate and failure rate is very low. 

Oxford's vice chancellor says the system will ultimately become too expensive, as tutorials cost more per student than the yearly tuition fees, which are capped at 9000 GBP . Educating an Oxford student costs about 16,000 GBP per student, which leaves a gap of 7000 GBP which is filled by various money-sources such as the endowments of colleges. His suggestion is to increase tuition fees – we know the outcome of unbridled student tuition fee increases – and it is a grim prospect. So one may wonder whether the tutorial is an institution worth preserving, given the costs. 

On the one hand, the tutorial system is a beautiful exemplification of what a liberal arts education can be. It is antitethical to MOOCs (massive open online courses). The latter are anonymous, mass-produced, have very high attrition rates. By contrast, tutorials are personal, individualized, tailored to the student, and have very low attrition rates. If we lose tutorials, we lose an exemplification in the real world of what undergraduate higher education can accomplish, namely an excellent way of encouraging students to work and think independently, and the personalized yet professional relationship between teacher and student. As Nussbaum observed, students cannot become educated by facts alone. Mass-produced higher education seems to be focused on learning facts, whereas tutorials can achieve a good balance between facts and reasoning skills. 

On the other hand, tutorials are very rare in higher education, and those who enjoy them are already privileged in many other respects (e.g., high socio-economic status, wealthy, private-school educated). As I read somewhere, but can't find the source, "Tutorials for the rich, MOOCs for the rest". It is sad only a small elite of mostly wealthy students have access to this wonderful form of individualized teaching, while the student-to-teacher ratio is increasing in most other British universities (only a few have a seminar-format where students can have some more interaction with professors). If tutorials are too expensive even for Oxford, perhaps we need to rethink how we can make a more individualized form of teaching affordable and sustainable in the majority of UK universities. Tutorials are probably too expensive, but something like the seminar format may be affordable, provided the British government wants to invest again in higher education.