Dear Lloyd and all interested,
I feel that I have to comment on the language issue, but certainly hope not to start a flame war.
- Finns should teach in Finnish, not in English and
- English teching is OK, if it is supportive, not pressing too much
I disagree with this for three reasons:
i) English is the working language of Science. If you cannot communicate effectively in English you cannot succeed in science. Sad but true. In the old system the students had nothing in English until the 3rd year, by which point they had forgotten all of their high school English. The standard of English of our new system students is far better than are old system students and while teh 1st year is tougher I think it really helps them in subsequent years of the degree and of their future careers. We need courses taught in English from the 1st year and even with the number of non- Finnish staff we do not have enough native English speaking staff - in fact we have 1 in total, me.
Sure, I guess everyone agrees that English is the working language of science and that the students should be exposed to it from early on. However, I as an "old-system student" never really saw this as a problem - even if most (but by far not all) of our courses were lectured in Finnish. All the textbooks naturally were in English. I actually rather see this as a benefit, as then the terminology will become familiar in both languages. I also strongly doubt that students would have forgotten all of their high-school English by their third year... Maybe this could be true for someone's highschool German, French, or Spanish, but hard to imagine it happening with English which we come across every day also in the so called normal life. I think it also should not be a point in itself to recruit native English speakers, but rather to find good scientists independent of nationality.
In my opinion, it should be for granted that every teacher gives lectures in English, if there is even one non-Finnish-speaking student in the audience, but I see no reason to do that if all the students are Finnish (I would guess, though, that there mostly are foreign students on the courses nowadays?).
ii) All of the text books and most of the material available on the web are in English. This makes learning the basics in English easier than learning them in Finnish; you don't understand something the lecturer said you have a huge number of choices to find out the information in whatever format suits you best. Students come in not knowing the biochemistry words, but they don't know them in Finnish either. Another comment to contextualise allm of this I have had comments from Finnish students that it is difficult to write exams on certain finnish-taught courses in Finnish because all the material available is in English and hence in the exam they are having to translate from English to Finnish in the exam.
No matter what the teaching language is, I think it is of utmost importance that the students also learn the terminology in their mothertongue. Mothertongue is the language of intelligence and if you cannot put something into words in your own language, I think, you hardly can claim to understand the point. Therefore, I would be very worried of a Finnish student who couldn't explain in Finnish something (s)he read in English...
iii) If Finns teach in English then they set a good example to the Finnish students - look it is possible to talk in English about biochemistry even if you are not a native English speaker. If only foreigners talk in English who is the example for Finnish students?
I have absolutely no problem with teaching in my non-native old- system English when there are students who don't understand Finnish but, when talking to Finnish students, I would find it akward to speak English and will for sure make my best to teach them in _good_ scientific Finnish (although, having grown old and lazy, I nowadays do forgive myself an occasional word of Finglish...) .
Again to contextualise this, the complaints from students came on Biomolecules about Tuomo and essentially (in the written forms that came past me) came from 2 students who were complaining mainly about 1 word he mispronounced. Finally on biomolecules we also have foreign students and so it has to be taught in English.
The benefits to the students far outweigh the costs.
What we do need is the English I course we originally designed and were promised and not the course we currently have that a large part of it is irrevelant to Biochemistry. Yet again I will have a meeting with Kielikeskus representatives about this.
Having said all this with a slight twinkle in my eye, I honestly hope not to have hurt anyones feelings. I hope we can keep on discussing this and other issues to improve both teaching and our research environment - also f2f.
With kind regards, Inari (with a happy marriage, four children, a passion for science, good friends, and maybe even some hobbies - at times exhausted with all this, but believing you only get one chance :-))
================================== Inari Kursula, Ph. D. Department of Biochemistry University of Oulu Oulu, Finland
inari.kursula@oulu.fi http://www.biochem.oulu.fi/tutkimus/ikursula/ http://cc.oulu.fi/~inkursul/ ==================================
On May 13, 2008, at 4:57 PM, Lloyd Ruddock wrote:
Dear all,
Raili raised some important points. My take on these are:
- we have to get feedback from all courses, many of them are now
missing
I agree with this completely, so many feedbacks did not get to the staff this year
- there are a lot of criticism about the order of courses
Biomolecules and Biokemian menetelmät I, which suggest that Biokemian menetelmät I should be the first, and Biomolecules after that.
I disagree with this very strongly. Methods I cannot be before Biomolecules for the simple reason that in Biomolecules students find out what is the structure of DNA, what is a protein, how does transcription, translation etc occur. Without these basic facts most of Methods I is meaningless - what can you say about SDS-PAGE or agarose-gel or PCR when you don't know anything about the molecules? Methods I was never the 1st course, it was the 1st practical course.
In an ideal world there would be some overlap between Biomolecules and Methods I i.e. they would run in part in parallel. This is effectively impossible due to timetabling constraints. The first year students do so much chemistry that there is not time for 2 biochemistry courses in parallel in the autumn term. Also we have to consider timetabling for biology and chemistry students who do these two courses. I have the autumn timetable in front of me to see what we can do to rearrange Biomolecules (it needs to be more compact), but it is difficult to do even this. Unless we bring Chemistry or Cell Biology (for 1st years) teaching in house we cannot run Biomolecules and Methods I in parallel. We cannot expand the teaching load at the moment, much as I would like to bring Cell Biology in house.
We should also contextualise what is meant by a "lot of critisism" about the order of the two courses......
Another major timetabling discussion is Microbiology. This is clearly not the equivalent of the other 2nd year courses, but there is no room for it in the 1st year and the other second year courses must go in the order Molecular Bioogy I - Protein Chemistry I / English for Biochemists II - Methods II. Combined with the teaching from other departments this leaves the only place for Microbiology to be where it is now. The better solution in my view for microbiology would be to have a course taught specifically for our students and not shaired with Process Engineeering, whose students know much less biochemistry are this point. Again we cannot expand the teaching load at the moment.
the third major timetabling issue is the lack of practical classes in the 3rd year. As discussed at feedback day in part this arose due to no practicals on the Cell Communication courses this year. However the major reason is that it was planned this way so that students could have the maximum flexibility for choosing their optional courses from other departments. With few practical classes and the large amount of self study in the BSc thesis we thought that students could have the flexibility to really do what they really wanted to do. We could balance the number of practicals between the years, but this would mean a serious loss of timetable flexibility in the 3rd year. Please could 3rd year students respon on this issue.
- Finns should teach in Finnish, not in English and
- English teching is OK, if it is supportive, not pressing too much
I disagree with this for three reasons:
i) English is the working language of Science. If you cannot communicate effectively in English you cannot succeed in science. Sad but true. In the old system the students had nothing in English until the 3rd year, by which point they had forgotten all of their high school English. The standard of English of our new system students is far better than are old system students and while teh 1st year is tougher I think it really helps them in subsequent years of the degree and of their future careers. We need courses taught in English from the 1st year and even with the number of non- Finnish staff we do not have enough native English speaking staff - in fact we have 1 in total, me.
ii) All of the text books and most of the material available on the web are in English. This makes learning the basics in English easier than learning them in Finnish; you don't understand something the lecturer said you have a huge number of choices to find out the information in whatever format suits you best. Students come in not knowing the biochemistry words, but they don't know them in Finnish either. Another comment to contextualise allm of this I have had comments from Finnish students that it is difficult to write exams on certain finnish-taught courses in Finnish because all the material available is in English and hence in the exam they are having to translate from English to Finnish in the exam.
iii) If Finns teach in English then they set a good example to the Finnish students - look it is possible to talk in English about biochemistry even if you are not a native English speaker. If only foreigners talk in English who is the example for Finnish students?
Again to contextualise this, the complaints from students came on Biomolecules about Tuomo and essentially (in the written forms that came past me) came from 2 students who were complaining mainly about 1 word he mispronounced. Finally on biomolecules we also have foreign students and so it has to be taught in English.
The benefits to the students far outweigh the costs.
What we do need is the English I course we originally designed and were promised and not the course we currently have that a large part of it is irrevelant to Biochemistry. Yet again I will have a meeting with Kielikeskus representatives about this.
- There are a lot of things we can try, in order to prevent
students flow to Medical campus -we should give concrete examples of working jobs to biochemists (as done earlier!), research is one choise but not the only one -we have to describe research projects going on in the department, and give the decription every year -tell to the student that science is fun, and tell them that we (most of us) are living normal life, having children, having other activities etc, not being workaholics!
Again to contextulalise this. This loss of students to the medical campus is virtually entirely in the 1st year. So we would need to do all of this effort to keep them in the first year at which point most of the research we do would be meaningless to the students. We already have presentations about research in Oulu to the 3rd year students (much earlier than we used to have them) and we have already agreed that these should be expanded next year to try to ensure all groups in the department present. We also have other features as part of that course e.g. public understanding of science etc that cover some of the other points. Unless I am missing something we present more things earlier on than ever before. An old system student said on the feedback day that they did not really understand what biochemistry was about until the Pro Gradu project. I hope that all of our new system students know this far earlier on.
We should also acknowledge that if somebody wants to go to medical school, they will go to medical school (if they get in - good luck to everyone taking the exams in a couple of weeks) no matter what we say about biochemistry.
The problem is (according to multiple students comments each year for the last 3 years) our new first year is much better training to get into medical school than our old first year - so paradoxically by getting better we lose more students.
Where we can try to cut down the loses is elsewhere, but again we should encourage not discourage 3rd years students to do MSc courses elsewhere if they better fit their future career choices, and at least several of the other losses from the system have not been losses to other departments/universities but a loss from the university to the "real world".
What we need to do is ADVERTISE in schools. too many 1st years tell me that they did not know what biochemistry was when they applied. The BSc thesis on public understanding of science includes options to go to a school but nobody did it this year. Some staff already do a lot towards public understanding of science, others do less and as an example just look how difficult it was for Sakari to get volunteers to help with science day.
On the final point science is fun, but according to nearly everyone who is asked to succeed in academic research it is hard work and something else has to be sacrificed. One recent article said that to suceed in modern science you could have only one of the following: a family, a major hobby, or going out and socializing regularly with friends. But to be good at ANYTHING you have to work at it, to sacrifice other things. It is also harder now than in the past to succeed in academic science (see attached recent article to get really depressed). We should not lie to our students, but nor should we treat it as something depressing. Why are we here doing the jobs we are doing if we could earn at least twice as much for far less work with the skills we have? There must be something? There is - the passion and the fun of finding things out, understanding how things work and knowing the impact that this can have on society through, in the case of biochemistry graduates who do research, understanding disease states and finding novel treatments or improvements to existing treatments.
Anyway it is 5 o'clock so I am off home to have fun with my children until they good to bed.
Best wishes,
Lloyd
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