The Influence of Public Policy
National bodies such as the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the United Kingdom and the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) play a significant role in funding projects and awards to promote stronger ties between teaching and research in universities.
The use of different funding streams for teaching and research has a significant impact on university structures and policies. Typically, Australian universities have separate leaders responsible for learning and teaching, on the one hand, and research on the other. Increasingly, too, additional leaders are being recruited to support community engagement and commercialisation activities. As a result, academic staff often perceive their research, knowledge transfer and community engagement activities to be distinctly different, even divergent, from teaching.
Feedback from academic staff respondents across eight universities and a wide range of disciplines overwhelmingly reveals the belief that research is far more highly valued than teaching in their universities. In summary, these academic staff views about the under-valuing of learning and teaching stems from the perception that:
- academic staff promotion in universities is primarily based on amount and quality of discipline-based research, rather than on excellence in and publications about teaching;
- there is considerably more funding and prestige attached to research (e.g. through the ARC) than to teaching; and as a result
- university structures, policies and practices tend to value research over teaching.
One reason for prevailing perceptions of the differing status of teaching and research may lie in the differentiated approaches to funding for teaching and research in Australian universities. To contextualise this, it is useful to start by considering national research funding policies and approaches in the UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Notable examples of the influence of such national policies on research funding include:
- the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), introduced in the late 1980s and conducted jointly by the higher education councils for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland;
- the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise, introduced in the mid to late 1990s and administered by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong; and
- the New Zealand Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), introduced in 2003 and administered by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).
In Australia, a similar research assessment exercise, the Research Quality Framework, was proposed by the former liberal government in 2006. This has now been replaced by the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative, to be developed by the Australian Research Council in conjunction with the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, for implementation in 2009.
At this stage, there are no similarly rigorous approaches to apportioning equivalent funds to universities on the basis of excellence in teaching and learning. Arguably this has contributed to academic staff perceptions that considerably greater value is attached to research over teaching.
Knowledge transfer and community engagement: a separating or integrating force?
Similar to UK and US higher education trends, Australian higher education has witnessed a surge of interest in the notions of knowledge transfer, third stream activities and community engagement (Hatakenaka, 2005). In June 2006, former Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, released a policy statement on ‘third stream’ activity, knowledge transfer and engagement. This ministerial statement coincided with a report (commissioned by the former Federal Department of Science and Training, DEST) entitled Knowledge Transfer and Australian Universities and Publicly Funded Research Agencies (PhillipsKPA, 2006). Later in 2006, the Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee (AVCC) released their Statement on Knowledge Transfer (AVCC, 2006), proposing several options for ‘increasing effectiveness of transfer of knowledge for economic benefit’ (p.2).
Despite a recent change of federal government, research commercialization and knowledge transfer continue to be a national priority. As universities and government focus on the tangible benefits of research for the economy and the broader community, several important questions need to be asked:
- What role does teaching and learning play in the transfer of research to the broader community?
- What is the link between the TRN and knowledge transfer?
- How might the TRN contribute to the knowledge transfer?
- How do we recognize and reward academic staff who want to connect their teaching with research, knowledge transfer and community engagement?
- What are the implications for national and institutional policies?
A danger facing Australian higher education at the moment is that of polarization around what are increasingly portrayed as two distinct sets of activities: high quality, high impact research as measured through research assessment exercises and commercialization activities, and high quality teaching that results in student satisfaction and thus contributes to positive performances on Learning and Teaching Performance Fund indicators (Krause, 2007).
If knowledge transfer is to become embedded in national and institutional policy in Australia, then it is important to ensure that policies and practices associated with knowledge transfer and third stream activities promote rather than impede the integration of teaching, research and scholarship in higher education. The challenge for national and institutional policy makers is to examine how the sector best supports and recognizes teaching, research and knowledge transfer as integrated, interdependent and mutually beneficial activities.
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National strategies to improve the alignment of teaching and research
