Deuxième rapport du Conseil des visiteurs du CFC

Ref: Meeting of the BoV, Toronto, 17-18 November 2003

The third meeting of the Board of Visitors was held in Toronto on November 17-18, 2003. All the appointed members to the Board, except Dr Sokolsky, on sabbatical leave, were present at this meeting:

• Peter Foot, Joint Services Command and Staff College
• Brian Job, University of British Columbia
• Marc Milner, University of New Brunswick
• Stéphane Roussel, Université du Québec à Montreal
• Joel Sokolsky, Royal Military College of Canada (on leave)
• Denis Stairs, Dalhousie University
• Albert Legault, Université du Québec à Montreal (Chair)

The following comments and suggestions follow on the third meeting of the Canadian Forces College Board of Visitors, and constitute our Second Report. It is broken down into four separate items:

• Purpose of the MDS Programme and Communications Observations;
• The instructional and assessment methodologies of the CFC;
• Deliverables; and
• Strengthening the Faculty Staff.

Purpose of the MDS Programme and Communications Observations

Purpose of the MDS Programme. We understand that the immediate purpose of the MDS programme is to provide officers who are being considered for promotion to senior ranks with an opportunity to obtain graduate-level education as an extension of the Command and Staff Course. At the most obvious level, this has to do quite simply with the provision of educational credentials that have recently become the pre-requisite for promotion to the senior officers corps, and the MDS is intended to be a primarily "professional" degree, albeit enriched with academic components.

More fundamentally, however, we assume that the ultimate purpose of the policy requiring senior officers to have graduate-level qualifications is to ensure that those who must not only fulfil operational responsibilities, but also carry the burdens involved in general policy development, planning, procurement and the like in an increasingly complex world (both at home and abroad) — that such officers are adequately equipped with the intellectual breadth and capacity for environmental assessment, critical analysis, and general judgment that such tasks require. We suspect that it is this more far-reaching purpose of the policy that has led some commentators to argue that the MDS programme is not sufficiently "academic" to perform its true pedagogical function.

While we think such observations are exaggerated and unfair, we also think that they warrant a substantive as well as rhetorical response, and we believe that some relatively modest adjustments can be made to accomplish this end, while simultaneously improving the programme. Some of our earlier recommendations — for example, those bearing on the need to recruit more academicians to the CFC faculty — reflect this view, and so do many of the observations that follow immediately below.

Communications. The first of our observations does, however, have to do more with "rhetoric" than substance. This is because we think the College’s own accounts of what the MDS programme is actually about are not always clear to "outsiders," and indeed it has taken your "Visitors" an unusually long time to develop a sense of the real substance of the curriculum. The distribution of the sample "Vortex" papers was of great assistance to us in this regard, and so also was the draft "brief" for the forthcoming OCGS appraisal team. We hope in the future to have an opportunity to examine a wider array of the substantive professional and academic "products" that the programme generates (see below).

In the meantime, however, we do think it would be very helpful if further thought were given to the way in which the programme is described and explained to others, so that its purposes and substantive content are properly understood by observers who have not been involved in managing its development day-to-day within the College. We notice, for example, that the "CSC Aim" is "to prepare selected Majors/Lieutenant-Colonels and naval equivalent for tactical level command and key staff appointments within operational-level joint and combined headquarters." But this "Aim" seems much narrower than the one that would presumably apply to a graduate degree aimed at broadening the intellectual and critical capacities of officers who are destined for the most senior ranks. It is also narrower than the list of "Expectations" that follow on p. 3 of the "CSC Assessment Framework."

Similarly, in the case of the draft brief to the OCGS, we observe that the first few paragraphs define the CSC as the "foundation course" for the MDS, and go on to describe its "primary intent" as "the development of senior officers for nomination into key tactical and operational-level national defence positions." The resulting "programme of studies and complementary academic activities" are then said to be aimed at the development of "professional capability in three complementary areas: military leadership, the planning of military operations and the management of military operations." Again, this seems to be a somewhat narrower focus than the one we assume underlies the real purpose of the "graduate degree" requirement that has recently been introduced as part of the CF’s promotions policy.

The College may, therefore, wish to give the communications issue further thought, and certainly it should be ready to provide the OCGS team with hard-copy samples of completed projects — including most notably "Research Projects" submitted as part of the requirements for the MDS degree — while the team is visiting the campus. Otherwise it will be very difficult for members of the team to get a "feel" for the curriculum and what it entails.

A potential improvement in the understanding of the MDS degree may include the production of a separate document on the MDS, describing the core requirements for the degree as well as the additional courses to the CSC that may lead to the successful completion of the degree. Much has already been done in this area with the production of the "Brief for the Periodic Appraisal of the Master of Defence Studies (MDS), Submitted to the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies" by the Canadian Forces College and Royal Military College of Canada.

The Instructional and Assessment Methodologies of the CFC

The Board's mandate includes a charge to review and comment upon "the instructional and assessment methodologies of the CFC". With this meeting, the Board took some initial steps to meet this responsibility.

In response to their request to see how academic assignments in the MDS Program are evaluated, Board members were sent copies of selected papers written for the "Global Vortex" assignment, (a short, 2,000-word report analyzing a current volume on international affairs) along with instructor's comments and grade for each paper. Members of the Board were positively impressed with the amount of feedback provided students on their work, particularly on matters of syntax, spelling, and word usage. However, they were in agreement that at the graduate level, students' demonstration of careful research, clear thinking, and sophisticated argumentation were most important and that accordingly assignment score sheets and students resulting grades should reflect that greater weight be given to these criteria. Board members expressed concern that the sample of graded papers revealed a lack of consistency of grading standards and modes of comment and evaluation from one grader to another.

The Board agreed that it should give more systematic attention to these matters at its next meeting, before making any recommendations. In particular, members of the Board look to reviewing the evaluation process for the MDS Research Project — the single-most important component of the master's degree. Members of the Board look also to clarifying the rationale for the current grading procedures for the Research Project — procedures in which the academic advisor of the Project provides only a pass-fail assessment and in which the subsequent letter grade assigned by the SMT marker "counts towards the course assessment for the CSC", but "has no bearing on the MDS programme."

Deliverables

The BoV noted opportunities for rethinking the deliverables on the CSC. These are summarised here:

• A better 'fit' is needed between the credits awarded for the MDS and the structure of the CSC. As examples, 'Officership Studies' is presented as having three, short deliverables; not all of these fall easily under this heading. Environmental Studies shows no formal written work, despite offering really excellent opportunities for doing so, for example, in single-service doctrine in a joint context. Again, more on professional military grounds than any other, a review of what the Stategic Studies element could generate might well yield useful, formal outputs.

• Presentationally, it is not optimal to include the MDS research paper (five credits, actually half the MDS) as part of any other course component. It is the most significant indicator of an officer's intellectual ability to cope at higher levels of responsibility.

• Clearer links need to be made between the 'Expectations' list (see CSC Assessment Framework presentation, 5th slide) and the design, research, writing-up and assessment of deliverables. The marked Global Vortex essays from 2002 usefully provided to the BoV members do not always show that students and markers were aware of this list as the baseline.

• Care is needed in presenting material to the OCGS. The draft report shown to the BoV suggests, for example, that a 2,500-word essay is a 'major' piece of writing and that a review of a book or article is research-based. Both claims need to be made more modestly.

These considerations are viewed by the BoV as ones which would simultaneously improve professional training and academic standards.

Strengthening the Faculty Staff

Le Comité tient à endosser complètement et sans réserve le projet visant à accroître le nombre de professeurs (faculties) travaillant à temps plein au Collège. Cette mesure, si elle est appliquée avec sérieux et détermination, contribuerait à résoudre une bonne partie des problèmes auxquels fait face l’institution et à faire taire les critiques dont elle est l’objet.

Les objectifs de cette mesure sont les suivants. En premier lieu, il s’agit de permettre au Collège de pourvoir, de façon autonome, i.e. sans recours à des ressources externes, et équilibrée, à tous ses besoins d’enseignement et de supervision. En second lieu, elle consiste à faire du Collège un pôle de recherche dans les domaines relatifs à l’étude de la guerre et de la défense. Enfin, en troisième lieu, l’augmentation du nombre de professeurs pourra améliorer la visibilité et la crédibilité de l’institution, notamment en multipliant les possibilités d’établir des partenariats de recherche avec des chercheurs de l’extérieur et de participer plus régulièrement à des activités de diffusion des résultats.

Le nombre idéal de professeurs devrait être fixé à un minimum de douze, ce qui constitue une "masse critique", tant en termes d’enseignement que de recherche. Il serait aussi souhaitable que le Collège se dote d'un poste senior d'enseignant. Ce nombre permettra notamment de couvrir les absences lors des congés sabbatiques et autres activités ponctuelles liées à la recherche ou à la formation. Leur embauche devrait respecter les critères et principes suivants :

• Diversité des domaines de recherche, de manière couvrir les besoins les plus pressants du Collège;
• Représentation égalitaire des sexes;
• Représentation linguistique équilibrée;
• Conditions d’embauche et de travail comparable à celles des autres institutions d’enseignement universitaires, en termes de salaire, de charge d’enseignement, d’accès aux fonds de recherche, etc.

The BoV members have expresssed their willingness to meet again in the beginning of 2004, if need be.

Dr Albert Legault
Chair of the Board of Visitors

9 December 2003