Reasons for employing RBL

Sally Brown, Northumbria University, UK and Graham Gibbs, The Open University, UK (1996)

1.1 Changes and problems facing higher education

As student numbers have increased, class sizes have grown and the funding available for each student has declined in real terms. In this context, traditional patterns of course design, delivery and support have shown severe signs of strain.

Libraries cannot cope
The traditional assumption that students can "read around" in order to learn after having attended lectures is no longer valid. Libraries that were established as resources for specialist scholarship are not very good at supporting mass higher education and very large classes in which several hundred students may be chasing the same books and articles at the same time. The most common student complain in the 90s has been that "the book is out". This is not just a problem for large introductory courses , where students are using a recommended textbook; it is also a problem on advanced courses where the library has only one copy of each journal article, which many students need to read.

Student numbers are not the only factor in the pressure on libraries. Libraries have been starved of cash for some time, and the combination of underfunding and increased book and journal costs have taken their toll. Over the past decade book prices have increased by over 200% and periodical prices by over 300% (compared with an increase in the RPI of 70%) while library spending within higher education institutions on books has risen by only 30% and on periodicals by 110%. Student numbers in this per iod have risen by 70% but seats for readers and floor space in libraries by only 7%. Library spending represents the same proportion of total institutional spending as at the start of the decade in the older universities but a significantly lower proportion of a much lower base in the new universities. Pressures to stock multiple copies of introductory texts have put further pressure on breadth and depth of holdings.

Often course teams could liaise better with libraries to make more efficient use of the range of existing library resources, and could redesign their courses to spread pressures more evenly. Students could also use more flexible and sophisticated information-gathering skills. Developments in on-line public access catalogues and CD-ROM indexes of bibliographic data, and full text data on CD-ROM will also change libraries' ability to cope. If students are going to read at all widely in order to learn then new ways must be found to provide them with access to reading matter.

Students are not buying their own books
Students have a proportion of their grants allocated for the purchase of books. However, students are under unprecedented financial pressure and despite most students' working to supplement their grants they spend only about half the allocated sum, on books. As book prices have doubled over a decade this means that there has been a dramatic decline in the number of books purchased. The Follett Report on library provision estimated that by 1992 only one sixth of students' reading time was spent reading owned books.

Students are more diverse
Students entering higher education come from more diverse backgrounds than ever before, in terms of their educational experience, qualifications, specific knowledge, interests, maturity and cultural background. They learn best in various ways and at very different rates. In modular courses they arrive at particular modules through ever more numerous routes and may have many different reasons for taking particular modules. Under these circumstances, courses which provide every student with the same info rmation at the same rate are unlikely to meet student needs or work successfully. Increased flexibility is required, and not only at the organisational level of the choice of modules or courses. Within each module or course, the educational processes need to offer more flexibility.

Large lectures do not work well
Lectures have never worked as well as their level of use might suggest, but large lectures work particularly badly. Many of the large rooms used for lecturing are ill equipped, and have poor acoustics, poor ventilation, and poor visibility for students sitting at the back or the sides. It is hard to concentrate for long in such circumstances, and problems of disruptive talking and lack of attention that distracts others are common. It is difficult for students to ask questions, difficult for lecturers to respond to questions, and almost impossible for lecturers to elicit answers to questions. Lecturers who have not been trained to teach and who have managed in the past without using audiovisual aids find their skills inadequate for teaching large lectu re classes.

Even if all these technical problems were overcome, it is unclear that a lecture-driven course could work well when the opportunity for students to build on the lecture by reading and private study is limited by the library problems identified above. Under such circumstances both students and lecturers start to regard the content of lectures as the entire content of the course. There is a pressing need in many large courses to find other, more effective, ways to make the basic course content available to students.

Courses have become more complex
A lack of explicit information about how a course operates - the timetable, topics of study, assessment pattern and reading requirements - is not too much of a problem when there is plenty of opportunity for students to talk directly with their tutors in order to find out how things work. As student numbers have increased and contact with tutors has declined, so it has become more necessary to provide basic information in writing. At the same time, courses have become more complex, with multiple parallel seminar or laboratory groups, more diverse student-centred teaching and learning methods, more demanding coursework assignments and the use of more varied and dispersed learning resources. As a result, written information has had to become more compreh ensive and detailed, and in some cases has developed into a substantial course guide.

Tutorial support cannot be afforded
In many universities students can no longer gain easy access to tutors to ask how to go about their studying, what to read when books on the reading list are unavailable from the library, or how to tackle problems presented in lectures. Open access has been replaced by severely limited office hours and booking systems. Students can no longer get the advice they need when they need it. The second most common student complaint, after "the book is out" is " my tutor is always out". Pressure is being placed on library staff and others to answer queries previously addressed to tutors. Advice is no longer available from tutors; instead tutors are anticipating the most common queries and answering them in advance, in writing.

Supervision cannot be afforded
Most extended project work, whether it involved technical or experimental work or a long essay or dissertation, has traditionally been supervised one-to-one. Tutors have met students to negotiate topics, plan research, discuss developments and work on drafts. As student numbers have increased and lecturers' availability declined, this form of individual and personalised supervision has become unsupportable. Projects have had to become more structured, requiring clearer briefing. Students need written g uidance providing general advice and basic information in order to compensate for reduced supervision.

Students need better information-gathering skills
It is becoming ever more important that students develop sophisticated skills in identifying and using information sources rather than that they "cover" a syllabus. Higher education must prepare students for learning primarily from resources after they graduate. Even if there were no library or resource problems, the rate of expansion of knowledge and rate of change in professions would necessitate the development in students of new and more extensive information-gathering skills.

1.2 Educational benefits

Access to learning resources
The most obvious benefit of RBL courses is that they make available to students at least the core learning resources they need. They can also offer students access to a wider range of resources than many conventional courses.

Increased independence
RBL courses tend to involve less fixed class contact time and more independent learning time. This can benefit part-time students. There may or may not be more intellectual independence or breadth of study.

Increased flexibility
Some forms of RBL allow students to work at their own pace to a greater or lesser extent. Others may allow materials to be studies in various sequences or tests to be taken when students are ready.

Throughness of planning
Teachers often take more care in the preparation of RBL materials than those for delivery in conventional courses. Resource materials are liely to be more clearly structured and easier to understand than a lecture with the same content, partly because tutors tend to spend more time on something that will appear in print and be open to repeated scrutiny by others. Similarly, the course design work that goes into RBL often brings a range of advantages because it involves more care over aims, learning activities, and instructions to students.

Consistency of approach
Where different tutors are running parallel seminar groups, problem classes or laboratory sessions, or carrying out work-placement visits, the use of resources such as seminar guides (see 2.3) helps to standardise everyone's approach and provides a shared understanding of what is to be covered and how. Where tutors change from one year to the next, such guides provide valuable briefing material and make the hand-over much easier and more economical.

Focus on active learning rather than teaching
Good RBL, properly integrated with other forms of teaching and learning, allows attention to be focused on student learning activities. The emphasis is on what students need to do in order to learn rather than on what teachers need to do in order to teach, on process rather than content. While students teach themselves and each other by interacting with materials and tasks, teachers can concentrate on important roles concerned with design, support, remedial help and assessment.

1.3 Questionable assumptions about RBL

Many claims are made for the efficacy and advantages of RBL. RBL is capable of delivering all kinds of benefits (see 1.2 above) but these benefits are not automatic. Some common assumptions about RBL are highly questionable.

It is not enough to write down the content
RBL is sometimes seem simply as a way of delivering course content to students more efficiently than in lectures or by providing enough books in the library; the resources produced by people who think of RBL like this often look like written-down lectures. In some contexts, such as mathematics, the delivery of content through resources may in itself be useful to students. But usually, for RBL to function at its best, it is necessary to pay considerable attention to process as well as to content. One has to ask what students will do with the material in order to learn whatever they are supposed to learn.

Some lecturers believe that their responsibility to students is over once the words have left their mouth in a lecture. Believing that writing down course material in a booklet is enough is the RBL equivalent of this attitude. Unless appropriate learni ng activities and assessment demands have been designed, and appropriate support, checks and feedback built in, students will do as little with such materials, and learn as little, as they do when passively listening to lectures and then filing away their lecture notes unread.

There is still a need for contact with and between students
The idea that expensive and logistically difficult human contact can be done away with is very attractive to managers. It is certainly true that some very good students do not need contact and will cope well without it. There are RBL courses where students who do not make use of the limited opportunities for contact actually do better than the students who do. Many lecturers were themselves this kind of student, and it can sometimes be hard for them to empathise with the needs of the majority of students, who are not so self-motivated, so self-disciplined or so bright. contact seems to be vital for four main reasons: pacing, motivation, sorting out problems, and understanding.

Most conventional courses have features that pace students through their learning: lectures, seminars and labs, for example, mark out each topic, and students have a sense that everyone in the room is at the same stage. Courses which eliminate the regu lar contact that provides this pacing function often have to reintroduce at least some kind of regular session, even if of a ritual nature, to stop students from drifting and getting behind. Distance learning courses, in general, have far higher drop-out rates and much slower progression rates than are acceptable in full-time higher education, and this problem is significantly worse for young students.

Contact is also important for motivation. Where courses have become impersonal, through the explosion of student numbers, and where students have little social contact with others, there is a need to build in team projects, self-help groups, study circles and other mechanisms for binding students together. Without social motivation - the feeling that they and their fellow students are all in the same situation together - individuals may become isolated and lose touch with the course.

In most disciplines, students who get stuck need help to sort out their problems straight away or they cannot make progress. In distance learning courses in mathematics there are different types of tutorial support for this very reason: periodic group tutorial sessions are not nearly as useful as being able to have a quick chat on the phone, or leave a phone, fax or e-mail message for a quick response. Students without any realistic hope of getting "unstuck" may give up or waste a great deal of time.

Finally, making sense of written texts can be very difficult. In the context of discussion, much meaning is generated through negotiation; but in RBL courses opportunities for discussion may be few. There have been attempts to develop students' ability to have "learning conversations" with texts on their own, but it is much easier simply to discuss them with others. If there is a danger of students' falling back on attempting to memorise material they cannot understand then it is vital to design into the course opportunities to discuss the ideas involved.

RBL may be inflexible
The common association between RBL and open learning has often misrepresented what is involved. The Open University, for example, is "open" in very few respects. Students study a narrow range of pre-specified materials, usually in fixed order, startin g at the same time, following the same schedule, submitting set assignments to the same deadlines, turning up to fixed tutorials and finally sitting an unseen exam on a fixed date, which tests the achievement of pre-specified objectives. That is not open learning. Many resource-based learning courses lack even the Open University's limited flexibility. Students may have to keep to a tight weekly schedule in which much of their timetable is fixed. they may be provided with less course material and own fewer books than Open University students, and their access to tutors may be at least as limited as Open University students' access to tutors and tutor-counselors.

In an attempt to guide students' supposedly independent study, materials may over-specify what is to be learnt and how it is to be learnt. In order to overcome library constraints packages may attempt to provide everything a student should read, and may thus effectively restrict the breadth and depth of their reading. In the UK< courses that follow the Keller Plan do not usually allow students to pace themselves, but set regular tests, which force everyone to work at the same pace. Lecture-based course s may allow students more flexibility, between lectures, than some RBL courses offer. Flexibility has to be carefully designed into a course and does not come automatically with the use of resources.

Students may not know how to learn from resources
Most students have learnt to regard teaching as the only valid vehicle for learning. What study skills they possess were usually developed to cope with taught courses. Many students find their first experience of RBL extremely disorientating and diffic ult. Their reading and study skills are not up to the task, they lack organisational and time management skills, they lack judgement about how much to do and when to stop, and generally study unskillfully and ineffectively. The Open University has had to put an increasing emphasis, over the years, on developing study skills during foundation courses. If you assume that your students already know how to learn effectively from resources then you will run into problems.

Students may dislike learning from resources
Today's students experience more financial pressures and so have a greater sense of "value for money" than previous generations of students. They like to see what their fees are paying for. There is often quite strong resistance from students to RBL: they suspect - sometimes with every justification - that they are being sold short when a small pack of material is thrust into their hands and they are told to go away and learn while their tutors are out of sight. Resistance is more common than acceptanc e, and unless steps are taken to inform and convince them of the value of RBL, students may well become disengaged and disillusioned, if not politically active.

While students may sometimes have good reason to doubt the quality of RBL courses, such courses are often better designed and more supportive than conventional ones, and may even involve more investment. What is more, students' reservations are more likely to arise from unsophisticated expectations about the nature of learning in higher education than from valid criticism of this teaching method. Nevertheless, their reactions need to be taken very seriously, because they govern the success of RBL among the constituency it is meant to serve.

RBL may not improve the quality of student learning
RBL is capable of producing exciting improvements in the way students learn, releasing their learning potential and greatly enhancing the quality of learning outcomes while saving resources. But RBL courses are as likely to produce disengaged students and poor learning outcomes as courses of any other design. There are well-documented examples of RBL resulting in reduced motivation, higher drop-out rates, lower marks and students who fall back on learning by rote as a substitute for trying to make sense of the material. Whether the potential benefits are reaped or quality collapses depends on careful and thoughtful design, sufficient planning and preparation time, adequate resourcing, thorough implementation and a continuing cycle of evaluation and development. Improvements do not come automatically.