Quality assurance

Such a catchy title! And it is also a very catchy topic. At the end of the academic year, we have to engage in a quality assurance process, and reflect on all our teaching. We have to reflect on how the changes we made last year worked out, how things went this year, and how we are going to improve in the next year. And then our Director of Teaching and Learning will take all that information and feed it into one big quality assurance document for the whole School.

We are working with the metrics of all modules, as I recently already discussed within the context of our exam board meetings, and also the module evaluation forms the students are asked to fill out. And it is difficult to get the majority to do that. I suppose everyone on the planet gets requests to give feedback on absolutely everything all the time! And quite often you get the impression it is only those who have an axe to grind who are motivated to fill out the form.

Altogether I do think there is a fairly high level of arbitrariness in the process. If you check, for instance, how the resources offered have been appreciated through the years, the fluctuations can be massive, even if the actual resources haven't changed. And, of course, you also just get different preferences; it is quite typical that you get one student saying they want more of a thing, and another student saying they want less of the same thing. Then you basically can’t do much other than just what you think is right.

An entirely different issue is that typically, students want more guidance in their assignments. But if you give them as much guidance as they would like to get, you are basically doing the work for them. Our degrees have to be worth something. So even if all the students are anonymous in that they want more guidance, you can only take this so far. 

In spite of the arbitrary nature and lack of statistical robustness, sometimes there is feedback that is just very useful. Things you hadn't really thought of yourself. That is where the process is at its most valuable.

I've filled them out now. I saved them all as drafts. If I still think of something to add that I still can. And when the deadline approaches I will just submit them all with a mouse click. That's another job done for this summer!