What's happening?

From the start of the next academic year (September), Cardiff Business School will not be supplying or distributing printed hard copies of handouts to students at lectures or otherwise. Instead, all teaching material will be put online and, if students wish to have their own hard copies of handouts, they will need to download and print them for themselves.

This affects all undergraduate (Business Management degree programmes, Accounting degree programmes and Economics degree programmes) and postgraduate (masters, PHD students) students at the Business School, like us.

This sounds like a great way to help the environment but it isn't.

What do we want to do about it and why?

While we recognise that the university wants to cut its environmental impact (and that's a good thing and should be applauded), we don't think this policy will make that much of a difference to the environment because students will still print the handouts. Perhaps a few won't but not enough to make a significant impact.

So why is the university bothering with this policy, if they know that it isn't going to work? Those of you who have studied economics will know that taxing a good with inelastic demand is a nice revenue generator. In other words, the university knows that students will pay to print the handouts, often on the library computers as not many students bring printers to university with them. This is nice little earner at 6p per sheet for double sided black and white printing. What happens to this money? You might think that this money stays in the libraries or even in the Business School, but you would be wrong. All of this money is sent to other parts of the university so will not be spent on department improvements or the library.

If the university is determined to scrap all paper handouts as part of its environmentally friendly measures then we propose that the university should provide students with free printer credit to cover printing the handouts. This will mean that only handouts that will be used will be printed, and will reduce waste, fulfilling the university's goal of helping the environment.

However, we also believe that as a caveat, the university should require lecturers to upload their handouts at least 24 hours before the lecture to give us sufficient time to print the handouts. We recognise that it takes a lot of time and effort to prepare lecture material but when lecturers upload handouts with short notice not all of us have time to stop by the library or print it at home before the lecture, and this makes it a lot harder for us, as students, to engage with the lecture. 

Why is this such an important issue?

Students already pay a lot in fees to the university with English undergraduate students paying £9000 a year and postgraduate and international students paying much more. When you invest £27,000 (the cost to an English student of a three year undergraduate degree) in anything, you expect value for money and a university degree is no different. This is not just a Cardiff University trend, students and prospective students up and down the country are demanding better value for money from their universities and comparing their universities. By making students like us pay for printing on top of our living costs and everything else, you are really taking the biscuit.

This student dissatisfaction will be reflected in student feedback questionnaires and most importantly in the NSS Survey, which is very important for student recruitment and university rankings, an area where the Business School is already struggling in comparison to the rest of the Russell Group.

Secondly, there was no student consultation on this policy whatsoever. Had a member of staff not alerted us to this recently, we would still be in the dark and none the wiser. We believe in democracy and transparent decision making and that clearly hasn't happened here. Staff have also reported that they were not consulted either (outside of the Learning & Teaching Committee panel).

Third, as a university with a very well respected and high ranking optometry department, you would think the university would recognise that too much screen time can be bad for your optical health. If we don't print the notes, we're still going to look at them electronically because we need to study their content and pouring over computer screens has been linked to eye strain and dry eyes. Neither are things you want to be worrying about in the run up to exams or in general.

Finally, implementing this new policy may also impact lecture attendance, as whether there is a new handout is already a deciding factor for some students. Some of us, who do not feel particularly engaged in lectures, will attend if we know that there is a new handout and providing those of us, who are already there, with something to annotate makes the lectures more interesting and engaging which helps us learn. We are sure that previous student feedback questionnaires and the Cardiff Business School Teaching Awards reflect our preferences for interactive teaching styles. There is also academic evidence to support the effectiveness of interactive teaching methods, so this is something that should be encouraged, not discouraged.

So what next?

Please sign our petition so that we can prove to the Dean of the Business School that we care about our handouts and our university and that we should have a say in the decision making processes.

There is a meeting next Wednesday (the 11th of May) to discuss implementing this policy and it would really mean a lot to us if we could show that we are not the only people who disagree with this policy.

We don't mean to discourage anyone from going to Cardiff Business School, we only wish to make our voices heard about its decision making processes.

Thank you for reading this, we know it is a bit long but we are very passionate about our cause.

Please share this petition with your friends.

Sincerely,

Student Academic Representatives at Cardiff Business School