Abstract:
In the past adult, vocational further education students enrolled in tertiary institutions
saw themselves as mere students. Now, however, many see themselves as clients or
customers of the institution. It would appear, therefore, to be reasonable to ascertain
what their real expectations are as clients or customers of their teachers. While there
have been a number of studies within the school system on this issue there is much
less current data available from the tertiary education sector. This paper reports a
study of vocational student and further education expectations of university teachers.
It was conducted on five different student cohorts all studying for an education
degree. The study showed that the student expectations of their teachers were mostly
concerned with the traditional teaching and delivery functions. The students regarded
communication skills, subject matter expertise, delivering relevant and current
content, enthusiasm and professionalism as being highly important to them. The
results of this study are congruent with those of recent studies by Trigwell (2001) and
Sander (2000) in that the teaching function of university academics is still the chief
concern of most students.
