I am currently attending university in Dublin (where I'm from) and although I have never attended university anywhere else, as part of a project for French, I had to find a Francophone exchange student to interview on the main differences between universities in Ireland (I guess outside continental Europe as Irish universities are very similar to British ones) and French universities. She came from Nancy and mentioned a couple of points that you both mentioned above, such as the price in Ireland being shocking compared to that of France and that she personally found the facilities so much better in Irish universities than in her university in France. Although, in agreeing with your initial point that students appear a lot more focused in British (in my case Irish) universities, I would agree and disagree. Yes, we certainly do see attending university as a priviledge due to the prices, however I find that many of my fellow students only really focus and take notes in class at the very begining of the semester (when we start new modules) and around exam time, however in between I find that many people start talking through lectures, don't take notes and sometimes don't even bother attending and then suddenly panick in the run up to the exams as a result. I would certainly agree that we are very reliant on technology, in regards to apps, etc. and that the university really does try to do everything to satisfy the student (within reason). And in regards to being "spoon-fed" slightly, I can see why you might think that, however (in Ireland at least) at high school we are completely spoon fed everything, so going to university (although they do help us a lot like I mentioned above) is still unbelievably difficult to adjust to and matures a lot of us as we are nowhere near as spoon fed as we were in high school, and thus have to be a lot more independent. Again, that is only the Irish example, not sure about elsewhere . In conclusion, although you believe it is spoon-feeding, we would consider it needed. Although I believe that that may have something to do with how high schools are run. I mean, maybe French or Belgian high schools are much less spoon-feeding to their students? When it comes to seminars, there are only a few courses in my universities who benefit from seminars, where the rest are mainly just lectures, so in Ireland anyway, I would say that we definitely don't put a lot of emphasis on seminars, or at least not over lectures. In regards to being able to choose one's modules within one's course or major, of course there are some majors in my university in which people can do that, however, there are also a LOT of majors which have modules, but they are fixed modules - we cannot choose them nor change them. And I do agree about having access to everything online, even if we don't attend our lectures, but I do believe that that depends on the professor in question sometimes. For example, some professors in my university literally put everything online for us to use, however there are quite a number who use are attendance as part of our grade and who put certain almost irrelevant (or at least non-important in regards to the exams) slides online, but only discuss the very important topics in class so that if you don't attend and miss out, it is your fault. It is interesting to hear how similar Irish and British universities are in terms of assessment. We are all very much essay-based here, with an essay per module with maybe one or two exams throughout the entire year and the grading is more or less the exact same. Also, the candidate number and linking anonymity is the most popular grading method in Irish universities too, however sometimes it depends on the professor or the clas size. Some lecturers prefer to know whose essay they are correcting. And I mean, if any of them want to know, they just search your candidate number on the university website and your profile comes up anway. Sorry this comment is so long, but I figured since no one else had commented yet, I had to make my comment worth the read. ;) Very interesting video, by the way.
Thank you Fred for another insightful video. I think here in Australia, we probably have the hybrid of the two systems. For undergraduate courses, especially 1st Year, it is probably more like school, more like the continental European style. Whether the students play up in lectures would depend on the crowd....they certainly did in mine! But they calmed down by the 4th Year :). It was hard to play up when there were less than 10 people in the class ;) For postgraduate courses, the dynamics can be very different. When I did my Masters, all the students in the course were practitioners, so it was a mutual learning situation between us and the professors. They had the theories and we had the experience. We all paid a lot of money to be there so nobody played up. All lectures were scheduled between 4:30 pm and 9:00 pm to cater for us. The discussions were interesting and stimulating. I love your videos BTW. Currently trying to pick up on my rusty French, so your language videos are super! Keep them coming please. You are a great teacher, much better than my French teacher at school. If my French teacher at school taught like you do, I wouldn't have ditched French as a subject. Still trying to master the French ' R'..... Boy, that is hard..... Cheers.
I think about the course content it really depends on the subject you study. I went to a uk university where I studied economics and management I was mainly assessed by exams with essay based questions. We had to do a lot of readings in order to answer these questions but the readings were given by the teacher, they expected us to know what they gave us
Oh, that was lovely...! I did Uni for Art/Design (/Fashion), at Central St Martins (London), so it was a bit different, but...yeah... most (/just about all) of what you both described was pretty accurate, and spot-on, re: Uni in the UK (...England, at least; i don't really know too much about elsewhere in the UK)!! Overall, from what you DID describe, i think that i prefer the "British System", and am therefore glad to have attended, there (...as am living in NYC, currently, but am from Britain).
I'm sorry, I think your guest doesn't know how to criticise anything respectfully. She is so rude towards French education system. ~Yasser, from India.
