What – teaching A-level? Given we are frequently heard moaning about how in the UK it is no longer done “properly”, we ought to be able to view this as an opportunity. Building on SAT (not GCSE!) could be a more homogeneous base, and remember that we can hire people with experience of the teaching level required.
Surely Depts should control admissions? Just think of the advantage in being able to do this later, at the end of what is year one in UK terms and with two years of student record to go on. So long as we are committed to providing accessible degree paths for students who do not meet the more stringent major requirements, this can be quite liberating.
We need to offer M level modules equivalent to what our undergraduate masters students get? You can: they are graduate level modules and bright/brave undergraduates can pull them forwards (possibly including from UC Davis).
Obviously the California students will be offered time at Warwick UK. Effort-wise, one efficient thing could be to fix that this is some particular year (or quarter or semester) and make it compulsory so we do not need to provide the corresponding teaching in California. Whilst the two Semester system is common in the US, University of California happens to use three Quarters roughly matching our terms except pulled forward by about a month.
Teaching Laboratory resources in California will take time to build up, with the high cost not easy to prioritise in early phases. We should aim to mitigate this through Lab experience in the UK. For example a California student might come to the UK for their Fall term starting early September and spend a month in labs before joining our term 1 (after which they would face a scramble to make start of California Winter term mid/late December), or they might come for term 3 and have our Labs to themselves…
However we also have to be realistic about the lab content of courses we first offer in California, and this is reflected in the sort of Major suggestions I have listed above. I can envisage some Dry teaching lab space in California shared between Engineering and Physics, and being of more limited interest for Chemistry and Life Science. How much Chemistry and Life Science could share common Synthetic/Wet lab space (not necessarily the same thing…) I am not sure: accessing Davis resources might be another way forward for these. Maybe we can find a radical new approach to Lab teaching, such as building it around secondments.
RCB 22/9/15
Suggestion from Mark Rodger 23/9/15: offer Warwick PhD students a teaching placement as a TA in California - for example to supervise lab component of a module.