Mundane Matters

Low-cost, everyday stuff beats big-ticket, expensive initiatives. Every time.

A lightly edited version of this was published in Times Higher Education (THE).

The venue for my first vaccination was Nottingham’s old Central TV studios. Waiting in the queue, two metres from the person in front, two from the person behind, I had a few moments to survey the scene. Dotted around this vast hall were dozens and dozens of desks, and a team of countless volunteers and practitioners, all of whom had a particular role to play. Some were injecting, some were triaging, some simply telling us where to stand. You entered the room and shuffled along the wall until it was your turn to be sent to a station somewhere in the hubbub. The whole scene was magnificent in its mundanity.

Throughput

As I stood there waiting to be beckoned, I began to reflect on one of the key elements of this success. Throughput. You have to get each person vaccinated quickly. To achieve this you need to ensure that the things that are done, from arrival to departure, are limited to the things that really have to be done. Put in a few extra, unnecessary steps, or cause people to duplicate effort, and you might add, say, five minutes to the time it takes to process each vaccinee. Multiply that by the number of people who have so far had the jab? That's millions of additional hours that have to be resourced.

When I'm not being vaccinated, I lecture in psychology at a university. Universities are organisations that tend to 'put in a few extra steps' (here and there). They are places in which people often end up doing things in parallel, and duplicating effort. I'm confident that anyone who works in one would agree. They are full of highly talented people, of course, but in truth, they are not known for their finely honed, lean systems. They tend, in my experience, to be large, unwieldy things that achieve success through sheer weight of will and skill. So, it has occurred to me to wonder how much benefit we might be able to get in our sector from analyses of the everyday actions of university employees, with a view to stripping out some of the more obvious extra steps and duplications. It turns out that it's not difficult. Take for example assessment practices.

Assessment

Imagine a department of, say, 150 academics. Within that department, there might be 70 'module leaders', in charge of, perhaps, 140 modules. A module is a 'chunk' of learning, with its own curriculum and assessment. The number of assessment tasks per module tends to vary between one and two, which gives us roughly 200 in all for the whole department across all its courses.

Every module and every assessment task requires, for sound pedagogical reasons, a minimum amount of documentation. Module descriptions are needed to tell students what this chunk of learning is about. Module reports are an important mechanism for critical reflection, accountability, and enhancement. A written specification is needed for every task to tell students what they have to do, by when, and against what criteria their performance will be judged. And the moderation of all those judgments must be documented.

If we add all of these together, then the basic yearly assessment infrastructure for this department requires a minimum of 800 documents. Traditionally the completion of these is done by means of each module leader locating the correct template, filling it in, and putting it in a folder on their computer before sending it somewhere. What if we could shave just two minutes off the completion of each of those documents? That would be a saving of nearly 27 hours of expensive, skilled academic time. That's 27 hours of teaching and research expertise that can immediately be spent elsewhere.

Working effectively

We make this saving by using a departmental database of modules; one which must exist already for all sorts of other reasons. This database generates all the required documents in a shared location, prefilled with standard information. So, 70 module leaders do not need to write their name, their email address, the module name, the module code (what is it again?), the courses on which the module runs (what are they again?), the weighting of the assessment task (did this one change to 70 per cent this year?) several times in 800 documents. It's all been done for them.

Furthermore, in editing and archiving the documentation in situ in the central location, the 800 parallel actions of downloading templates, renaming, saving, re-uploading (where is this one meant to go?), forgetting-and-finding-again, and so forth are no longer required. All this is quite apart from the benefits of everyone, including peer reviewers, course teams, external examiners, and so forth being able, reliably, to view the single, most up-to-date, definitive copy of every item whenever it is needed. For all of this I am going to make a conservative estimate of five minutes saved per document.

There isn't the space here to track these savings deeper into the system once we include time saved on marking procedures, grade entry, and the reduction of error. Neither is there space to comment on the enhancements that result, in terms of the collective ownership of assessment across a large team, and in the provision of individual written feedback to students on every one of over 2,000 separate examination scripts, at zero cost, by means of the same mechanisms. Let's just leave the argument here with just short of 100 hours of academic time saved by doing little more than preventing colleagues from having to write their name out numerous times.

Celebrating the mundane

The problem is that this topic is so mundane, so 'less than interesting' that it is rarely the focus of anyone's concern. After all, this really isn't rocket science. But my assertion is that we stand to make major 'wins' (in the vernacular of 2021) by tackling this small stuff, at comparatively low cost. And these wins have a much bigger, more sustained pay-off long term than do some of the bigger, pricier, 'set-piece' initiatives that grab everyone's attention. We've just seen how to save nearly 100 hours of academic time through the sensible deployment of existing IT resources. Admittedly, it's not millions of hours. Lives don't exactly depend on it. But it's a hundred extra hours of support to our students. A hundred extra hours of better feedback on their work. And those things matter.