Living by the Quality Measures
January 27, 2011
A quick run around the office today – more moderating for my colleague in Cat & Class 1, picking up my own marking, which I’ll complete over the next week, and attending the plenary session for my Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
Today the topic was quality and how we measure it. My assessed piece of work is about digital identity, so I was particularly interested in the online presence of the QAA and, especially, the national student survey.
There was a bit of a heated debate on the validity and importance of student opinion generally, with some people holding the opinion that students aren’t qualified to judge the quality of the teaching they receive from us.
My own experience couldn’t be further away from this. I guess we’re lucky in our department as we only teach postgraduates, but certainly I would be at sea without the input from my cataloguing students 2008/9 – 2010/11 – they’re even getting an acknowledgement in the book for their thoughts and insights as a group.
This year I asked the Historical Bibliography students for feedback on 10 questions to help plan the course for 2011/12 – ranging from what were their favourite and least favourite sessions through to whether or not they would be interested in attending a short CPD course to top up their skills and how much they would be willing to pay. The feedback is tremendously helpful in future planning. Although student popularity can’t – and shouldn’t – be the only concern, it”s an important part of the matrix and I appreciate the input from my classes.
