Vocational students' expectations as clients in tertiary education

In the past adult, vocationalfurther 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 deliveryfunctions. 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 Trigwelll2001) and Sander (2000) in that the teaching function of university academics is still the chief concern of most students