England’s £4 million learning gain investment ‘could go to waste’

What this actually means is that the OfS are not intersted in learning or where the students come from. This is not very surprising given the market-domninated ideology within which they operate. It simply reaffirms their perception of students as consumers and their complete disinterest in meaningful improvement. Higher Education in the UK is fast becoming a synonym for student farming and this is simply symptomatic of the complete failure of leadership. Universities UK will express some token concerns and quietly let this die, most members of the Russel group will be overjoyed and once again the learners will lose out.

This highlights the fact that the OfS is pretty worthless as far as universities are concerned, and probably not much use for those students who actually want to benefit from their studies... if they are not interested in learning and teaching, one wonders just what they ARE interested in as regards higher education (the clue is in the name!). Perhaps the Higher Education Academy should step in here!

Doesn't the phrase 'not enough students could be persuaded to participate.' say enough?

The comment "Start with the end in mind" seems to be missing in this attempt to identify a mythical "learning gain" by students. In the absence of there being a clearly defined "lump of learning" that has to be weighed and measured at the end of the process, the activity was doomed to failure from the start. The sheer variety of university subjects, institutions, students and teachers makes the idea of measuring learning gain by some magical, one size fits all "End Point Assessment" futile. You can take a student to learning but you can't always make them think. Given a good diversity of teachers we might hope to instill students with a general type of critical thinking that might enable them to understand the difference between truth and falsehood. Perhaps finding a way to measure this competence could be one way forward.