2 nd Period of Quality Assurance: Quality Enhancement in HE

1. 2nd Period of Quality Assurance:Quality Enhancement in HE Diane Grayson

2. 21st Century context • International • Ubiquitous, powerful ICT • Ready access to enormous amounts of information • Globalisation • Sustainability concerns • Workplace mobility and career changes • Recent • Global economic recession • High unemployment, especially among youth } Social and political upheaval

3. National • Lingering inequities • Serial curriculum changes at school level • Limited knowledge and skills of school-leavers • Stringent labour laws Compliance rather capacity development Job-hopping rather than working your way up

4. Total population in five-year age groups and sex (Census 2011, Statistics SA)

5. Throughput rates for 2005 cohort in 3-year degree programmes excluding UNISA (CHE VitalStats)

6. Throughput rates for 2005 cohort in 4-year degree programmes excluding UNISA (CHE VitalStats)

7. The need • “Higher education is the major driver of the information/knowledge system, linking it with economic development. However, higher education is much more than a simple instrument of economic development. Education is important for good citizenship and enriching and diversifying life... • Massive investments in the higher education system have not produced better outcomes in the level of academic performance or graduation rates. While enrolment and attainment gaps have narrowed across different race groups, the quality of education for the vast majority has remained poor at all levels. The higher education therefore tends to be a low-participation, high-attrition system.” • [National Planning Commission 2012]

8. But we have enormous systemic problems Selection Placement Retention Progression Graduation

9. We have to work together as HEIs • We need HEIs to utilise collective wisdom, expertise and experience to • Institutions adapt, adopt, apply solutions appropriate for their own context } share good practices that enable identify obstacles to design solutions to problems that prevent STUDENT SUCCESS

10. Student success • “…the long-term ‘college success’ question encompasses not only whether students have earned a degree, but also whether graduates are in fact achieving the level of preparation– in terms of knowledge, capabilities and personal qualities– that will enable them to both thrive and contribute in a fast-changing economy and in turbulent, highly demanding global, societal and often personal contexts.” • Carol Geary Schneider (in Kuh, G.D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices. Washington D.C: Association of American Colleges and Universities)

11. First cycle– Institutional audits • Engagement in individual institutions around ensuring quality in 3 core functions of teaching and learning, research and community engagement • Aimed to bring all HEIs to acceptable level of quality • All public and 11 private institutions audited • 7 institutional audits due to be closed in 2013, remaining 2 in 2014

12. Second cycle– Quality enhancement • UK QAA-- Quality Assurance: •  “the means through which an institution ensures and confirms that the conditions are in place for students to achieve the standards set by it or by another awarding body” (QAA 2004), • Quality Enhancement: • “the process of taking deliberate steps at institutional level to improve the quality of learning opportunities....” (QAA 2006). • Scottish QAA • “has defined enhancement as taking deliberate steps to bring about improvement in the effectiveness of the learning experiences of students.”

13. Reconceptualising teaching FOR learning in the 21st century • Teaching has no value if it does not lead to learning • Universities don’t have to do what they always did (lecturers standing in front of large groups of students, presenting information) • Accessing information isn’t a problem nowadays. We need to teach information processing skills--which information to access and what to do with it. • Harness technology to create flexible learning opportunities • Less well-resourced institutions can leapfrog into the 21st century

14. Our focus will be… • The enhancement of student learning with a view to producing an increased number of graduates with attributes that are personally, professionally and socially valuable. • 1. enhanced student learning, leading to an • 2. increased number of graduates that have • 3. improved graduate attributes • STUDENT SUCCESS

15. Factors that affect student success (from 1st cycle) • Teaching • Curriculum • Assessment • Learning resources • Student enrolment management • Academic student support and development • Non-academic student support and development

16. Workload Course allocation Pedagogy Philosophy TEACHING Promotion Logistics Teacher characteristics Professional development

17. Assumed prior knowledge and skills Coherence Progression Time CURRICULUM Level and standard Overall load Prerequisites Updating and renewal Progression

18. Format Relationship with objectives Moderation Variety ASSESSMENT Cognitive demand Marking Purpose Feedback Timing

19. On-line learning environment Lecture theatres LEARNING RESOURCES Labs Library Equipment ICT Student learning spaces

20. Placement Selection STUDENT ENROLMENT MANAGEMENT Admissions Completion rates Pass rates Exclusions

21. Mentoring Alternative programmes Extra support ACADEMIC SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT Curriculum advising Career guidance Academic performance monitoring

22. Physical and mental health Clubs and sports NON-ACADEMIC SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT Community service Leadership Finances Food, transport, accommodation

23. Approach • 1st cycle • Criteria specified from the beginning • Institutions engaged sequentially • One process used throughout (self-evaluation, visit, report, improvement plan, progress report) • 2nd cycle • More inductive- themes will emerge during the process • Institutions engaged simultaneously • Different processes will be used at different stages • Iterative

24. Institutional submissions Analysis Feedback Institutional capacity development Collaboration Analysis Symposia, working groups Projects of other bodies Research projects

25. Academic planning and administration Student support Student life Future graduate Physical, resource and technical provision Curriculum, teaching and assessment INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE Possible sub-groupings around areas of activity

26. Time frames • 2013 • Meet with DVCs for Teaching and Learning • Hold national and regional gatherings for advocacy and awareness-raising • Pilot • 2014 • Receive institutional submissions and analyse them • Publish key issues, good practice, challenges • 2015 • Facilitate meetings of groups of institutions • Analyse and synthesise group reports • Facilitate spin-off activities, e.g. workshops, working groups, symposia, research projects • Publish useful findings thusfar

27. EXAMPLE: Scottish QAA Enhancement:Graduates for the 21st century theme • “Across the Scottish higher education sector, the most prominent outcome of the work of the G21C Theme is a robust and well-articulated collaborative grasp - or understanding - of the attributes and qualities which are needed by the twenty-first century graduate. • That grasp is collaborative in a vitally important sense, because it represents a shared understanding across the Scottish sector that has emerged by institutions learning from and with one another - but it has not been constructed in a form that overrides or submerges each HEI’s institutional identity. On the contrary, and integral to the goals of enhancement, each HEI has been encouraged to develop a vision of graduate attributes for the twenty-first century that best reflects its own distinctive mission, ethos and strategic priorities. Those institutional visions are therefore also a key outcome of the G21C Theme…. • The second principal outcome of the G21C Theme is perhaps less visible, but deserves full recognition. It takes the form of the robust toolbox of strategies that Scotland's HEIs have developed throughout G21C, individually and collaboratively, to advance and embed within institutional practice their enhancement of the student learning experience.”

28. Anticipated outcomes • an environment characterised by collegiality and willingness to collaborate among institutions, and with institutions and other role-players in higher education, on improving student success; • development and implementation of policy; • structures or groupings of people or institutions for addressing obstacles to student success in a systematic, measured and monitored way; • resources that can be shared among HEIs and their students; • additional resources that are made available in certain areas of activity to develop sustainable, long-term capacity at less well-resourced institutions; • development and use of tools and indicators for better monitoring of improvements in student success • codes of good practice for promoting student success.

29. Broad desired outcomes • Enhancement of the quality of undergraduate provision • Enhancement of the quality of graduates • A higher education system that is improving continuously as members of the higher education community collaborate to share good practice and solve shared problems.