The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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11:27am on Monday, 24th January, 2022:
Anecdote
It was my first CE217 lecture today. 87 students were due to attend, but there were only 30 present at the start and 58 at the end. It seems that 9am lectures, even over Zoom, are too early.
I noted that some of the people who choose my lectures aren't gamers, but pointed out that they still need to keep up with games. I mentioned that these even applied to those who take the module basically because they can't program so looked for a module with no programming in it.
Someone then stated in the chat that they'd chosen my lecture because I have an English surname. English isn't their first language and they have trouble understanding some of the other lecturers for whom English also isn't their first language, so they chose CE217 in the hope my English would be better.
This is one of the unspoken dilemmas we have in our department. Something like one in seven of our members of staff have English as their first language; the rest are all fluent speakers, but some of them have accents that students find hard to follow. Looking at the Student Assessment of Courses responses (which resemble the NSS scores but are local so we can see the results), most of the top-rated modules are taught be people who have English as their first language — except the ones we give in China, which are taught by people with Mandarin as their first language. Language ability does seem to play a part.
One of the reasons we score so badly on the National Student Survey could therefore be that our large number of students with English as their second language have trouble understanding our large number of lecturers with English as their second language.
There is absolutely nothing we can do about this.
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