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'Small countries, large outcomes', speech NVAO-chairman Karl Dittrich at Conference on learning outcomes, 3-4 september 2007, Switzerland

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,

Twenty-five or thirty years ago the life of a university lecturer was actually quite simple! Programmes consisted of several subjects and as a teacher, you were responsible for one (and sometimes more) of these subjects. In my case the subject was "Dutch Politics" within the Political Science programme at the University of Leiden. It was an introductory subject in the third year of the programme. I had a clear overview of my teaching life: I knew how many hours of lectures I had to give (4 hours a week for 10 weeks), I knew what subjects the students had taken in their first and second years, I knew the gist of what my colleagues would be doing in their subjects and I could end my course with a written exam. The only uncertain factor was the number of students.

This is the tradition in which I grew up, first as a student and then as a young academic. I was expected to understand my field and be able to teach it, and the most that could happen was that the professor responsible for the programme would take a look over my shoulder at the topics I wanted to treat, at the reading list and at the exam questions. If comparatively many students failed the exam, then the blame lay with them and not the course material, and certainly not with the teacher! The authority and expertise of the teacher was not subject to discussion and students were expected to learn what was prescribed to them.

That was it: no teaching evaluation, no peer assistance, and certainly no students assessing the teacher. Were people badly taught in this way? No, absolutely not! Was there place for these students on the labour market? Of course there was! Did graduates perform poorly? Not at all, because they completely satisfied what had been expected from them and their programmes! And all of this was based on the implicit image of what a graduate in Political Science should know and be capable of.

For a number of reasons, this supply-oriented teaching model came under increasing discussion from the nineteen-seventies onwards:
- The number of students in higher education was growing explosively and becoming more diverse: neither the facilities nor the ex-cathedra model of teaching had provisions to accommodate this increasing enrolment and diversity;
- As a result of the growth in the number of students, costs rose sharply; in turn, the universities were required to increase their yield and reduce the length of their study programmes;
- Because students had to pay tuition fees, they expected value for their money;
- Young lecturers, students and educationalists unleashed ‘revolutions' in teaching approaches;
- The labour market began to complain about a lack of linkage between education and the needs of the business community and between education and fast-moving developments in technology and professional practice.

On reflection, it is worth noting that these developments mainly led to a change in a number of educational paradigms, the most important of which is that the emphasis in the education system shifted from the teacher to the student: student-based education became the dominant educational principle, while the independence of the learning student was encouraged as well. Educational innovations such as Problem-based Learning, developed by the Canadian McMaster University, and Project-driven Learning called on the learning capacity of students and transformed the position of the teacher from educator to coach, counsellor and motivator. These changes without any doubt had a positive effect on large numbers of students but definitely not on all of them, since there was too little consideration for differences in learning styles. Moreover, many teachers had great difficulty adapting to their new roles and this transformation often went hand in hand with teachers-educators losing enthusiasm for their subjects. In addition, teachers noted to their regret, that attention to course content lost out to thematic teaching.

At the same time, however, external society continued to put pressure on the education system. This pressure consisted not only of having greater numbers of students enter programmes, because (western) society appeared to have an increasing need for graduates; the pressure was also to have graduates become productive in the labour process as quickly as possible and this led to an ever increasing emphasis on skills: knowledge should be able to be applied and made practical; knowledge had to be communicated; people should be able to work in teams, preferably interdisciplinary and multicultural ones. And, moreover, graduates were also expected to perform independently, to be prepared to continue learning and to be creative and innovative!

All these requirements and desires were put on the plate of education institutions and I am therefore not surprised that higher education has been unable to make great inroads in fulfilling them. In addition, I do not think that all of this can be done at the same time and I believe that above all, we should prevent education from developing along a single line! This means that choices have to be made. And, in my opinion, learning outcomes can play an important role in this. I regard learning outcomes as being the intended results of a period of education and I define them as "statements of what a learner is expected to know, understand and/or be able to do at the end of a period of learning". At the end of an educational programme of a particular length, graduates should be able to demonstrate that they have attained a certain level. Internationally this is referred to as ‘qualifications". I take "qualifications in higher education" to mean "any degree, diploma or other certificate issued by a competent authority attesting that particular learning outcomes have been achieved, normally following the successful completion of a recognised higher education programme of study". In the Dutch and Flemish systems we use the term "final qualifications" as well. These are defined as "the intended learning outcomes of a programme". Both the definition of "learning outcomes" as well as those of "qualifications" and "final qualifications" are in line with commonly used international terminology.

To arrive at a as high as possible degree of comparability between programmes, within and between countries, descriptors have been developed that offer general points of reference for defining the outcomes of programmes.

The Netherlands and Flanders sought to link up with the five so-called Dublin descriptors developed by the Joint Quality Initiative :
- Knowledge and understanding
- Applying knowledge and understanding
- Making judgments
- Communication skills
- Learning skills

These five descriptors are a tool for describing learning outcomes, so that account can be taken of the desirability of not only raising the knowledge component to the desired level but also other elements that are (or could be) considered necessary for bachelor and master's degree graduates to be able to perform at the correct level.

Benefits

In Dutch and Flemish higher education, working with learning outcomes is already well established. Universities of professional education in particular, as well as Dutch universities of technology, have made real progress in designing their education programmes to fit this new structure. What are the benefits of this approach? I would like to list five:
1. The first - and possibly in terms of content the most important - benefit is that the teachers (or, more broadly put: those responsible for the programmes) are forced to occupy themselves seriously with the question of what the intended results of the programme should be and how these results may be realised. This entails the drawing up of a profile, an ambition level, coordination with the professional segment for which students are being educated, and proper consultation between the teachers involved. Deliberations have to be made and decisions taken on the content of programmes, on the didactic model to be followed, on the structure of the programme, the method of assessment, the facilities needed and the expertise of the teachers; this can be done for each programme as a whole or for the various components of each programme.

In the Netherlands and Flanders, universities of professional education in particular have invested in recent years in drawing up profiles of professions and programmes in cooperation with industry. Currently, these profiles are regularly updated at both the national and regional levels to keep the programmes as up-to-date and dynamic as possible.
The research universities, on the other hand, often still have a long road to travel, while some of those responsible for programmes continue to swear by the belief that the only real learning outcome is the educating of "good ......let's say 'lawyers'"

Footnote: I would like to dwell for a few moments on a long-standing misunderstanding: working with learning outcomes does not say anything about the teaching model needed! All kinds of different models may be suitable and it is certainly not the case that, for example, only competence-based teaching should apply! My personal view is that it is precisely the variety in teaching methods that provides the best guarantee of accommodating the diversity of learning and teaching styles of students and teachers. If a well-considered and conscious choice is nonetheless made for a single teaching model, then the programme is obliged to make clear to the students to what type of study behaviour this model leads, and students are obliged to ask themselves seriously if they are capable of the required learning style or if they like to learn and employ it in order to thrive in such a model.

2. Back to the benefits of "learning outcomes". A second benefit of working with learning outcomes is the increased transparency of the programmes for students, teachers and the labour market. For these groups of stakeholders in particular, education would be served by the highest possible degree of clarity. It is essential to get students to the right place as quickly as possible, especially now that the diversity of student populations is increasing and programmes are rightly responding with a more varied offer. Moreover, a proper description of the desired outcomes of (components of) programmes would assist in bringing structure to the learning activities of students. For the labour market, learning outcomes offer better insight into what knowledge and skills can be expected from graduates.
Even more so, the possibility is created for employers, professional groups and individuals to respond to learning outcomes and in this way to add more substance to the dialogue needed between the business community and programmes. However, a starting point here should be: the higher education sector should be responsible for the content of the programmes. The higher education sector does more than provide professional and job-oriented education alone and only the higher education sector itself should carry the final responsibility.

3. A third significant benefit of the application of learning outcomes is that it expands the possibilities for international comparability and cooperation. For small countries like the Netherlands and Flanders, that are both hallmarked by an extremely open economy, internationalisation is an absolute must. Part of this internationalisation is, of course, becoming familiar with and learning from other cultures and views. The Netherlands and Flanders carry out an active education policy in this area by both increasing the numbers of foreign students and allowing their own students the opportunity to travel abroad. In this respect, the risk of ‘academic tourism' has to be minimised. I believe that the use of learning outcomes makes it easier to increase student mobility in a useful way because the institutions themselves and the students are urged to make the most suitable choices regarding programmes, irrespective of location.

4. A fourth benefit is the contribution that these learning outcomes can make to the widespread recognition of the need for lifelong learning. For this reason, increasingly more countries are working with accreditation of Prior Learning. The more specified the learning outcomes with which a programme works, the more easy it naturally becomes to assess Prior Learning and subsequently develop tailored programmes so that students receive that to which they are entitled.

5. A fifth and final benefit is that learning outcomes can assist in limiting the strong growth of individualisation in education. I am referring here to the cafeteria model popular in some educational and managerial circles in which students compile their educational package according to their own insights. Learning outcomes can help to clarify that not every package leads to the qualifications that the programme intends and desires!

When we list these benefits, it is no wonder that in recent years enthusiasm for working with learning outcomes has grown significantly both within and outside of higher education institutions. That is why, when setting up and implementing the accreditation systems in the Netherlands (since 2002) and Flanders (since 2003), we took the use of learning outcomes into account.

In the accreditation frameworks, learning outcomes are referred to under themes 1 (aims and objectives), 2 (curriculum) and 6 (results). Given that what is concerned here is the assessment of programmes, the frameworks refer to "final qualifications". The assessment therefore takes place based on three related questions: "what does the programme intend to achieve?" ("aims and objectives" and "final qualifications")", "how will the programme achieve its objectives?" ("curriculum" and "learning assessment") and "does the programme realise its objectives" ("results").

In this way, accreditation is reduced to the essential question: does a programme deliver on its promise at the nationally and internationally accepted levels for bachelor and master's degree programmes? The addition of the international context is essential, because the point is that programmes need to be well aware of the fact that the qualifications to be granted must be acceptable to the national and international higher education sectors in terms of level, orientation and content. This is also a reason why NVAO sets such great store by the assessments of intended and achieved learning outcomes through international panels. Needless to say, this cannot always be arranged: 5.000 Dutch and Flemish programmes in the higher education sector cannot all be assessed by an international panel. The higher up the qualifications ladder you go, the more essential international assessment becomes: I believe that for master's degrees and PhDs it is a conditio sine qua non!

In the context of international assessment, it is of course of special interest to see how a panel treats the subject or discipline-specific content of final qualifications. In recent years, NVAO has somewhat regularly been confronted with negative assessments of subject-specific qualifications. Virtually all these cases involved programmes offered by private, commercial institutions. Their standard was clearly not high enough! They had catered too much to the wishes of (some) of their clients!

Concerns

However, I am not just enthusiastic about working with learning outcomes. I also have a number of serious concerns and I can see possible dangers. I would like to list five of these concerns here, based in part on my experiences with accreditation procedures.

1. The first - and in the long term, most critical - concern is that the impression could be given that a wide range of skills, focused particularly on performing in teams and on the ability to communicate is being favoured above knowledge. In the Netherlands - and Flanders too - competency-based teaching is under heavy fire because the institutions and programmes have insufficiently demonstrated to students, teachers and the labour market that "competences" not only comprise skills and attitudes but that they can of course only be exercised from a sound basis of knowledge. I believe that this is also a clear disadvantage of using the word "competency" because it is a term that is commonly used to refer to a skill and in this way its connection to knowledge is becoming too weak. Especially in the Netherlands, students are also beginning to complain more often and more loudly about what they see as too much attention being devoted to personal development, through personal development plans and personal action plans, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is left too much to the students themselves.

2. A second concern of mine is the ease with which administrators and education managers introduce new educational principles and models almost exclusive from the top down. Moreover, such policy changes are frequently coupled with cutbacks - "after all, students can learn independently" - and at the least they go hand in hand with a lack of resources for introducing the desired innovations. Furthermore, research universities appear better able to resist this top-down approach than are universities of professional education, due to the position of professors and to the persisting and justifiably accepted principle of academic freedom. In practice, students appear to be at risk of falling victim to an all too dynamic introduction of these innovations. Moreover, it again appears that within a number of institutions there is little patience for the phased introduction of models and educational principles based on thorough analyses and evaluations; no, on the contrary; rather we have seen catastrophic examples of institutions deciding to introduce a competence-based teaching model based on learning outcomes, at a single stroke and for all programmes and study years!

3. As the concept of learning outcomes becomes more broadly defined - and there is, as emphasised earlier, much in its favour - so must we examine more closely the ways in which these outcomes can be assessed. Assessing knowledge is relatively simple when compared with assessing skills, especially if the desire is to integrate knowledge and skills into competencies.
The experience with a well-designed didactic competency-based curriculum with multiple-choice tests as the assessment instrument, makes me shudder. But it demonstrates how broad - and therefore how costly - each shift of paradigm is in education!

4. My fourth concern is the possible overly dominant role of the business community, to which I referred earlier. With all due respect to the business community, which in this context I take to include not-for-profit and non-profit organisations, I am regularly disappointed with its short-sighted view of education. This view is too often only focused on the short term, on an immediate contribution to the production process (and therefore on added value); it is virtually blind to the medium to long-term developments in industry. The result is that programmes are regularly confronted by the pressing needs of the labour market, as is currently the case in the ICT sector, while a few years ago, the business community predicted almost no further growth in the ICT sector. The same applies to the question of whether there is a need for either broadly trained or specialised technicians, particularly engineers.
A few years ago, it seemed bon ton - at least within the Dutch business community - to urge for "broad training", while for about a year now, this same business community has been emphasising the demand for specialised programmes. Of course we need to be understanding of the problems faced by the business community in forecasting economic trends, but there should also be understanding for the difficulties this causes in terms of changing the content of programmes and for the fact that these changes only become visible after several years.

This is also one of the reasons why I regard with increasing suspicion the requirements set by professional associations at the European level. These lead to individual quality labels, but that would also inevitably lead to uniformity. And as far as I am concerned, that would be in direct conflict with the observation that diversity and differentiation are increasing, both in student populations and in professional practice. In my opinion, due to the European developments towards a single labour market, national ministers of education are allowing their influence to be reduced. I view this as a threat to higher education and to what I believe is the necessary diversity and differentiation in programmes.

5. In closing, I would like to voice one final concern. I am ever more astonished by the ease with which the higher education sector pays little or no attention to differences in learning and learning styles. Students do not all learn in exactly the same way, just like teachers are unable to perform equally well in each and every didactic concept! It is astounding that we time and again ignore this truth by choosing for a single education model, as much standardisation as possible and preferably a single teaching method. I believe it is worth recommending that programmes take proper account of the type of students they wish to attract and of the capacities of their teaching staff. "Marketing" is predominant in many places: enrolling as many students as possible and subsequently simply seeing how it goes. It is astonishing to say the least, to see with what pomp and glory an increase in student intake is announced and how silent it falls when yield figures are discussed!

That is why I have grave concerns about a number of developments in higher education!

Recapitulation

However, to conclude, I should say that I still am positive about the changes that the introduction of learning outcomes will entail for education. Let me recapitulate:
1. all teachers are "forced" to collaborate in thinking through the aims and objectives of programmes and in achieving the learning outcomes;
2. for students, teachers and the labour market, the use of learning outcomes leads to transparency of education;
3. learning outcomes are necessary for properly describing qualifications within the context of the comparability of European degrees and diplomas that is needed for further internationalisation;
4. the defining of learning outcomes makes it necessary to have or build a good and sound relationship with the professional field and to seek the updating of the content of the education provided whereby the responsibilities of all parties should be clear.

These are the compelling arguments that I believe should provide a strong impetus to the introduction of learning outcomes. But I do attach some warnings: do not do this lightly, but rather deliberate carefully and act in phases; allocate sufficient financial resources for these changes and for the training of teachers; restrain the business community from interfering too much; choose for a clear aim and profile, and try to invoke the interest of the right type of students and teachers. If this happens, learning outcomes can play an important role in updating higher education and making it more dynamic. And that is something that both our students and our society deserve!

Thank you very much.

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