A lot has changed in university pedagogy over the past two decades. Long gone are the days when teaching was something that simply happened to students in whichever way the lecturer saw fit. Student-centred teaching is now very much the watchword, as universities seek to give learners a sense of agency and partnership.

That trend pre-dated the rise of the student-as-consumer phenomenon that, in England, is particularly identified with the tripling of tuition fees in 2012 – as well as with anglophone universities’ increasing reliance on international students’ high fees. But marketisation has certainly reinforced the student-centred agenda in teaching, as university and course leaders compete to attract students – who often make their choices partly on the basis of previous cohorts’ satisfaction scores.

Student-centred teaching has also coincided with a rise in the status of teaching within universities, symbolised in England by the launch of the Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017 – based in part on the results of the National Student Survey – as a counterweight to the Research Excellence Framework.

As the TEF gained momentum, there was even talk of rating courses on the basis of teaching intensity: a measure of class sizes and contact hours between lecturers and students, reflecting the value for money that students saw in contact with academics.

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But then the pandemic hit, and contact hours reduced to zero – at least in physical terms – as teaching moved online. And they have never quite recovered, with some teaching remaining online, while stories abound of sparsely populated or even empty physical lectures.

Nevertheless, according to Hannah Cobb, professor of archaeology and pedagogy at the University of Manchester, the pandemic experience has only cemented the student-centred agenda. Not only did the pandemic accelerate the adoption of digital “tools that allow for greater dialogue between academics and students during classes”, such as polls and quizzes. It also “heightened our awareness of how students can feel isolated and how we need to work together in a way that’s laden with care, that raises all voices”, said Cobb, who was previously the head of e-learning in her school.

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The result is today’s “much greater emphasis on student belonging, student well-being and things like ”, which have recentred learning around students’ needs and relationships with staff, according to Cobb. 

Student-centred approaches also reflect a generational shift in students that, according to Kate Eichhorn, professor of culture and media studies at The New School, New York City, was “already beginning to restructure higher education” prior to the pandemic.

“You could feel the arrival of Gen Z,” she said, noting that its members are more vocal than previous generations about mental health and more morally sensitive to course content – and, therefore, more inclined to object to it.

The need for compassionate approaches to teaching continued post-pandemic as the cost-of-living crisis forced many students to prioritise part-time work over their studies. Meanwhile, new students, who did significant parts of their schooling under lockdown, are shyer and quieter than previous cohorts, according to Rachel Wilde, associate professor in education, practice and society at UCL. “They need quite a lot more help in engaging with each other and with us,” she said.

That is especially true for international students, who may also struggle to articulate their thoughts in English and may be unfamiliar with student-centred learning.

“It’s really challenging because I think some of the international students come with the expectation that they’re here to learn from you as the expert,” Wilde said. “While there is an element of that, I’m constantly having to say, ‘I want to hear what you think; what’s your take on this?’”

This general shyness means that “the techniques we used in the past haven’t worked as well as they have previously”, said Wilde. An example is paired working, where students discuss between themselves and report back to the class. Sometimes “they just won’t say a word [to each other], and it’s really odd”, she said. “I’m not sure I’ve found a particularly effective way to counter it.” 

Wilde speculates that this reticence can be attributed to a generation who have grown up with social media and are therefore “hyper-aware of how they are seen all the time”. By the same token, some appear more comfortable interacting with technology than with others face-to-face. For instance, she has seen students asking ChatGPT a question, rather than asking her in front of the class. 

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Jedidiah Evans, a lecturer in English and writing at the University of Sydney, also feels a responsibility to cater in his teaching for the international students whose numbers have exploded again in Australia post-pandemic, prompting claims that they are pushing up rent prices in big cities and leading to the political imposition of effective limits in their enrolment.

“As an academic, I think you feel this responsibility on the one hand to be a space of welcome, hospitality and generosity to students who have been maligned,” Evans said. “But at the same time, it is quite challenging when, increasingly, you have whole cohorts of students who are working in an unfamiliar language environment, with whom you find it very difficult to connect simply on the basis of a failure to communicate. There’s a balance there to find.”

He also thinks there is a balance to find in terms of attendance of physical lectures. Evans has his own horror stories, having once given a lecture to an audience of just one student – a “demoralising” experience for an advocate of physical teaching even though the lecture was also available for his students to view online.

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Evans laments that the pandemic only cemented a growing sense among some academics and pedagogues that lectures are “elitist”, “inefficient” and simply “not sexy”. “Because students couldn’t go to traditional lectures [during lockdown], it was a bit of a ‘gotcha’ moment for people who were already looking to question or undermine them,” he said. And he noted that, as student attendance declines, academics now need to make the case to their managers if they want to continue with physical lectures.

Evans is no Luddite. For a very large, cross-disciplinary, first-year introduction to academic writing module, he has experimented with “very brief, almost YouTube-style” short videos that students can watch on the go. Yet while this approach has been “lauded” by colleagues, he does not feel this is an appropriate direction of travel for more in-depth, discipline-specific modules.

“If I can no longer do a lecture, it limits my options for connecting with my students,” he said. “If that’s 900 students in their first year who I won’t ever see again in their degrees, that’s one thing. But there are fewer and fewer touch points with the actual lives of people, and I think that’s a concern.”

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In that sense, lecturing to mainstream students compares unfavourably with teaching prison inmates, which he also does. With no access to the internet or AI, the prisoners display a level of engagement that is like “a throwback to what the classroom used to feel like”, allowing them to be much more “self-revealing” and honest.

Evans worries that “catering towards student demands…[risks] potentially framing students in the ‘end-user’ speak of university management”. Instead, academics need to push back against what students think they want, and ask: “What is my responsibility as a teacher?”

That question is particularly apposite as we move into the era of AI. One question is how much lecturers should rely on it to write exams, grade papers and even do the teaching itself. Early indications are that students are cautious about this: a recent survey of nearly 4,000 students from 16 countries found that 55 per cent believed overuse of AI within teaching devalued education, and 52 per cent said it negatively impacted their academic performance. 

The other question revolves around students’ own use of AI. Another recent , this time of more than 1,200 Australian students, found that one in four students are concerned that they learn little or nothing when they use generative AI for study – but 11 in 20 expect their universities to provide them with the tools anyway.

Phil Newton, an academic integrity expert and neuroscientist at Swansea University’s medical school, agreed that caution about using AI in teaching and learning was justified. While he is “largely an optimist” about AI’s impact on higher education, “as a neuroscientist who spends a lot of time teaching about learning, I worry that we will lose sight of the basics of how humans learn”, he said.

“Learning is cumulative,” he added. “We learn new things by modifying our prior knowledge. We learn how to do critical appraisal by first learning basic concepts and facts and then building on those. Society wants us to graduate independent critical thinkers. One cannot critically appraise a subject that one does not know the basic facts about.”

So where should the line be drawn regarding student preferences in teaching and assessment? The New School’s Eichhorn notes that the liberal arts model pursued by her institution gives students a wide choice over which modules to take, and their small-seminar approach “assumes that student voices play a key part in any learning experience”.

Nevertheless, “a student-centred approach – an approach that puts students’ needs first [as opposed to] faculty or institutional needs – is not the same as a student-led approach,” she cautioned. The former is about prioritising student needs and the latter is about letting students determine what this experience should be, even if it doesn’t support the common good and only serves their own needs. I sometimes worry that we’ve tipped the balance over to a student-led or even student-dictated approach.”

Eichhorn attributes blame for this to teaching evaluations. “Any student who is registered, even if they haven’t been present for most of the semester, can share their opinion, and it’s very difficult, particularly for part-time, contingent and pre-tenure faculty [not to act on the knowledge that] ignoring any small student preference or special request can put a faculty member at risk of being negatively reviewed.”

The problem is that students do not always know that their preferences are bad for their education – and in such cases, she believes, educators should help them see that.

“Modern education has generally focused on the collective experience of the classroom – the value of coming together to learn how to listen to each other, how to communicate and how to collaborate,” she said. “I think most students still crave this experience, but I do think that there are a growing number of students who don’t see this as a goal they should aspire to support. Part of the solution here is to help students understand the value of the classroom as a collective experience.”

UCL’s Wilde agreed that student-led teaching “doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything a student wants. Particularly as the rise of AI puts a premium on human skills, she believes that universities should be explicit about “the fact that learning is not something that just happens in an individual mind in isolation”. Rather, “it is through dialogue – expressing ourselves, listening to others’ perspectives – that we develop the higher cognitive skills of being able to analyse and become critical thinkers”.

For Wilde, then, student-led teaching “means understanding where a student is, and where they need to be to engage in higher education, and what support is needed to get there”.

An example is a socially anxious student who struggles to engage with others. Reasonable adjustments that Wilde has made include allowing them “to pick where they want to sit and who they want to talk to, and making an effort to create a safe space by agreeing ground rules with a class”. But if such “small things” aren’t enough, a student may have to take “time out of university in order to work through [their] issues”, Wilde says.

So while interrogating student preferences should be “part of the way in which we design our teaching”, this should not amount to “a one-sided demand-and-response”. Rather, teaching needs “an ethos of partnership”.

“We need to recognise everyone’s experience and expertise,” Wilde says – “including the longstanding knowledge that higher education staff have about teaching and their subjects.”

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