Quality Enhancement System Development
Contributions to the system of quality enhancement in the University are being delivered with leadership from the Associate Director (Quality Enhancement). Programme Directors are key stakeholders in quality enhancement and we regularly brief them and ensure our delivery of data and evidence about modules and qualifications meets their needs. Contributions to the Study Experience Programme identified dates for the new calendar for the annual quality process, driven by the changes in the academic year.
Quality Enhancement Seminars are held every spring, and key features of the design of highly successful modules are identified and highlighted at these events. Learning Design views of each module are created and play a useful role as hard copy background for the presentations.
Learning Design
Learning Design (LD) is a project providing design tools that enable views of module design to be developed by all faculties, using the same tool set. Workshops and awareness raising across the University increase the usage of these tools for both new and redesigned modules. There has been extensive interaction with the Stagegate development team and LD is now integrated within the process view. With the launch of the new StageGate process, workshops for key staff are underway to highlight the way in which LD and Stagegate dovetail and that LD can support design at both qualification and module level. The performance view of module design brings together key data on performance indicators, retention, pass rates and demographic data.
Cloudworks is a website where academics from many institutions share activities focussed on a range of learning design approaches - it is free and open for anyone to use.
Data Wrangling
Data wrangling is the activity of analysing feedback (usually student survey data), retention and pass rates, and Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) usage data where available, to provide an overview of module-level differences on a faculty by faculty basis. Reports for each faculty are produced, analysing end of module survey data alongside student retention and progress data, data from the VLE and module design.
In future we aim to relate the timing of reports to feed into the schedule for annual quality review, as far as possible, and thus to support Programmes. Data Wrangler reports will happen twice a year in line with the main survey periods.
The PVC (Learning & Teaching) initiated a Quality Enhancement Advisory Group (QEAG) which met twice in 2012. The first meeting received an overview of all the wrangler reports and suggestions for action. These have been accepted and work is underway in IET to document both good module and good forum designs, as the basis for action at module and qualification level.