Resource Decline in Higher Education – Perceptions and Consequences

Abstract

Teaching students is one of the main tasks of LTH, as thousands of students engage on their engineering studies at the faculty every year. The funding for teaching these students is an essential source of income for LTH, but in recent years there has been an increased worry for diminishing financing for lecturing at the faculty. This study aims to investigate how lecturers perceive the development and what practical measures they have taken in their courses to counteract it. Interviews with ten lecturers at the department of Building and Environmental technology were performed. Many different practical strategies for dealing with the situation were documented during the interviews. The strategies are mainly focusing on making the students do more of the work on their own, e.g. working with the course literature. But the approaches to the problem varied greatly, as some lecturers tried to change as little as possible in order to save time, and others who saw a need for restructuring the entire educational program.