One of the things that marks out Canadian student unions from their counterparts in (say) the UK is the relative lack of emphasis unions put on advocacy relating to academic quality.  For any student unions that want to change that, the next couple of weeks would be an unprecedented opportunity to do so.

The remote semester has created a fundamental pickle for institutions, one which is baked very deeply into the fabric of Canadian academia.  Namely, while universities have the responsibility of attracting students and making promises to them with respect to the quality of their education, it has very few tools to do much about guaranteeing such quality, largely because its employees don’t believe their employer should have the ability to do so.  Such is the nature of academic freedom in Canada.

Now, in most cases, this isn’t a problem because professors are (as their name implies) professional and diligent and have put in an unprecedented number of hours over the summer to produce quality content for an online semester.  However, the university itself – hell, even many faculties – have only a limited ability to discern what its professors are doing in response to COVID.  Have they produced masterpieces of interactive content, or are they just doing the same old lectures on Zoom?  The answer matters because there’s still a real risk of a significant wave of drop-outs this term due to the remote format.  That risk is going to be lowest in classes where professors have worked to re-format their materials to the new medium and highest where they haven’t.

And here’s where student unions need to come into play.   Students themselves are going to be the ones who have the best view on whether a transition to remote teaching is working or not.   They’re going to be the ones who have the closest eye on which individual courses are meeting the mark.  They’re the ones who are going to know whether courses have been made properly accessible by using Universal Design for Learning principles, etc.  And these are things that need to be pointed out, pronto, and not deferred until November during the end-of-course evaluation, especially where there are problems in courses that might be considered “mission-critical” for students (i.e. those classes which act as gateways or pre-requisites to later courses).  

In an ideal world, a student union would be working with all the faculty- and departmental-level associations to identify the problem courses in the first week or two of class and bringing these to the attention of the administration.  And the administration, in turn, would work with individual professors to provide whatever supports are necessary to make some emergency course-corrections (so to speak), placing particular priority on the “mission-critical” courses before they become a major source of dropouts and failures.

Now, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons there are not that many student unions who are set up to do this kind of thing.  But there’s no time like the present to start: they can get out there right now to forge the links with faculty and departmental associations that would get the word out on documenting issues in remote courses.   They can start right now to work out with university administrations and faculty unions what would be the most productive way to provide feedback that would lead to quick improvements (on the flip side, administrations and faculty unions can start to think about what the correct answer to that question is).

Beyond this, there is one area where student unions can play a valuable role in the weeks ahead, and that is with respect to assessment.  Back in March, there was an almighty foofaraw at the University of Alberta with respect to how grades were being calculated in a pandemic (briefly: the university decided to go pass/fail and those students who had worked hard for high grades during the semester were cheesed off).  That kind of issue is probably a one-off – assessment this term should in theory be the result of careful deliberation rather than a chaotic reach for a best-solution-in-an-emergency as it was in the spring.  But there are a lot of other issues with respect to assessment to which to pay attention, in particular the respective roles of coursework and exams, and whether or not (and how) such exams might be proctored.  It would be useful for student unions to lead serious discussions with their members about these issues over the next few weeks, and for students, faculty and admin to find ways to discuss them together over the next couple of months.

Students can, given proper resources, structure, and experience, play a really important role in improving the quality of educational institutions.  But they need some encouragement to see how that role would work and given some clear avenues to provide constructive feedback that leads to change.  This term gives us some opportunities to do that. As a system, we should seize them, and put students closer to the heart of institutional quality assurance.