Draft Teaching Quality Retreat Page

When and Where

Programme

Teaching Quality Components

Sample Student Complaints/Allegations

• No feedback or inadequate feedback or late feedback. [UNSW guidelines indicate that student should get feedback on a substantial piece of work before the middle of the session, so that they are able to withdraw without failure if they can see from their feedback that they are off-beam in a particular course. Such students will still have to pay for the course, so this is not as soft an option as it might look at first glance.]

• Workload too high or too low

• Students feel put down by tutors/demonstrators/lecturers

• Slow or no response to e-mails seeking help or information

• Students not treated with respect, privacy not respected

• Assignments/exams not marked on time

• Assignment specifications ambiguous/frequently changed

• Lecturers not adequately prepared to teach

• Tutors not adequately prepared. [This could be because the tutor was slack, or because the tutor did not get access to the tute material including solutions early enough to prepare in time.]

• Difficulty getting a piece of work (assignment or exam) re-marked

• Students allowed to cheat/given extra time/... in mid-session quiz

Possible Teaching Quality Strategies

• course (quality) director

• centralised quality checking

• advisors/trainers within the School

• sitting in on each others' lectures

• sitting in on tutes/labs

• formal training for tutors

• formal training on management issues for lecturers

• loadings dependent on quality indicators

• [your ideas here]

Managing the Impact of NICTA on Teaching Quality

???

Teaching Quality Retreat agenda suggestions

[your suggestions here]

Gernot:
I expect that the issue of monitoring and promoting teaching quality will be discussed more broadly than this curious course director role. I'd like to see a discussion of some more systematic (and credible) quality auditing and, in particular, constructive steps to improving teaching quality in places where it is most lacking (fixing the average course isn't going to make a big impact, fixing the really bad ones will). This includes getting the word out to students that we care about quality (at the moment I don't think too many trust us on this one, and I think they are right to be sceptical, individual efforts notwithstanding).

JAS:

• 4th-year thesis marking ... not just the fact that some people take too long, but it's not clear what criteria people are using to award marks ... I don't think it's plausible to compare the quality/worth of two theses based on the marks ... this was especially bad when the thesis used to comprise 1/3 of the final honours grade ... I hope it doesn't carry this much weight any more.

• the Course Director looks essentially a policeman to kick recalcitrants up the bum ... I don't see why this Teaching Quality person shouldn't essentially take on the Course Director role for all courses ... it seems to fit in with their role of promoting teaching quality.

  BillW's comment: I'd like course directors, like project directors/project managers in engineering industry quality control, to be a team rather than a citizen/policeman relationship. Thus the course director could assist in appropriate cases by negotiating extra resources for the course, or by being a sounding board with whom the lecturer could discuss problems, or by reviewing assignment specs, ... Having a single course director would make this infeasible. Having multiple course directors makes it possible for course directors to bring domain expertise to the role, at least in some cases.

• maybe one way of forcing people to pay attention to assessment would be to change the way we pay casuals and *don't* allow them to do marking ... if academics have to do all assignment marking, they would, at the very least, have to think a bit harder about how to do the job better.

• a spin on the previous topic is, the CSE people who get screwed most by late marking are course directors ... we get students coming along for Academic Standing interviews and advice with a FL and a couple of WD's ... there's really no point in giving any advice until the WD's are sorted out ... it's now late Jan ... why weren't they sorted out a month ago?.

  Note that a WD can be the difference between being on Probation and being Excluded for postgrad coursework students. Note also that NSS only checks once, and checks in early January. If people still have WD's when the Academic Standing census occurs, they can sneak through and avoid exclusion if the WD turns into a FL.

• Shouldn't we first define what, exactly, constitutes "quality teaching"? *Not* just getting good student ratings. This is based on a number of irrelevant factors (e.g. presentation skills of lecturer), along with some that are relevant (e.g. was assessment appropriate).

• Prac Exam Environment

  • some people seem to agree that Prac Exams are a good idea

  • the thing that stops them being more heavily used is the amount of effort to set them up

  • in particular, a standard CSG-maintained Prac Exam environment that gave the LIC easy control over what the students had access to would help immeasurably

Ken:

Herewith my 2 cents worth.

Course quality directors

I think this is a bad idea. Not from the point of view of whether it will work, but from the viewpoint of effective use of resources. Each course currently has a LIC. That person is responsible for assuring quality. What we seem to be now proposing is the assignment of any extra person (or persons). That is simply an inefficient use of personnel.

It should be noted that having a team responsible for the delivery of a course is a completely different issue.

I would not be against the establishment groups and mechanisms within the School to assist with the achievement of quality, but simply assigning a quality director to each course is a way of avoiding the issues, and at the expense of staff.

Outcomes based

Whatever we do about quality, I suggest it should be based on outcomes, not on mode of delivery, lecturer flamboyance and other attributes that finally aren't important.

To this end we should know ---and somewhere it should be explicitly stated--- what outcomes we expect from each course. This means knowing the level of competence each course is intended to achieve, and how it is to be measured. What is the curriculum designed to achieve? What are the assignments designed to achieve? What do the examination questions measure?

The current agenda for the retreat lists a number of complaints mainly to do with delivery or course management. These clearly affect quality, but I don't believe that they represent the nub of course quality; that has to do with objectives.

A Comment

Gernot says, "This includes getting the word out to students that we care about quality". There is only one way of demonstrating that we care about quality, and that is by delivering it.

Bruno:

Would this retreat be a suitable forum to discuss the possibility of having multiple lecturers teaching in a course (which is the norm in biology, for example) rather than the current common CSE model of one course one lecturer?