Join us on Wednesday 14th of October at 8.00pm (GMT/BST) with our guest contributor, Doug Specht, University of Westminster (@dougspecht.bsky.social). This #LTHEChat on BlueSky will look at Happiness vs Satisfaction.

Some years ago a second-year student appeared at my office door without an appointment. I had just failed his essay and I was braced for a complaint. Instead he said, “I just want to say thank you for failing me.” He had been scraping through each assessment for a year and a half, happy to pass but quietly dissatisfied, because he knew he was not doing his best work. The fail gave him the push he needed. He left with a better degree than the one he had been heading for, and a far more satisfying one.

That conversation has stayed with me because it separates two things we often run together. Happiness is made of short moments of pleasure or relief. Satisfaction is slower and lasts longer. The two are connected, but they work on different timescales, and they can pull in opposite directions.

I wrote about this for THE Campus in 2022, as the sector came out of the pandemic and into a political climate of “low value” degrees and headline satisfaction scores. My worry then was that universities were drifting towards keeping students happy in the moment: generous marking, events that sit outside the learning, investment in things nobody uses, all to head off complaints real and imagined. That drift has not gone away. If anything, generative AI has added a new version of the same temptation, since it can now remove almost every difficulty from a task at the click of a button.

None of this is an argument for toughening students up or making university unpleasant. Satisfaction includes wellbeing, and we must keep looking after the real needs of our students. It is an argument for repositioning our own practice around the long term. In the original piece I suggested three ways to do that: keep the whole learning journey in view, not just the next deadline; use “good friction”, the deliberate and well-explained difficulty that keeps learners invested; and design assessment that is authentic and tied to learning, so that even a disappointing mark becomes a moment of learning.

In this chat I would like to test those ideas against your experience. Where does the pressure to please come from in your context? Which kinds of struggle are worth protecting? And what would change if we designed our courses for the satisfied graduate rather than the happy student in week six?

Biography

Dr Doug Specht is Head of the Westminster School of Media and Communication and Reader in Cultural Geography and Communication at the University of Westminster. His work in education focuses on curriculum and assessment design, student success, and how universities respond to generative AI, and he co-authored the HEPI FUTURES framework on capabilities for a human-AI world. His research looks at how knowledge is made and shared, from maps and data to media and public understanding. Doug is a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and holds Chartered Teacher and Advanced Teacher Status. He is also a Chartered Geographer.

BlueSky: @dougspecht.bsky.social

Links

• Should we be aiming for student happiness or student satisfaction? (THE Campus): www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/should-we-be-aiming-student-happiness-or-student-satisfaction

• Capabilities for a human-AI world: the FUTURES framework (HEPI): www.hepi.ac.uk/reports/being-indispensable-capabilities-for-a-human-ai-world-the-futures-framework/