Quality Assessment & PDCA Cycle for courses
Quality assessment must be an integral part of course planning and implementation. Quality, however, is a multifaceted aspect and, when assessed efficiently, must consider several stakeholders, such as teachers, students and the university. An important goal of quality assessment at the course level is to support well-informed decision-making regarding the development of the course.
While course feedback from students is an established practice in many universities, collaborative courses can also be evaluated at an institutional level (I.e. how the partners cooperation succeeded) and by teachers (e.g. self and peer-assessment of co-teaching process). From a teachers’ perspective, collecting constructive feedback from both peers and students in their collaborative courses might be also an advantage when building a teaching portfolio that includes international and cross-institutional cooperation. From the university perspective, evaluating the cooperation can shed light on the efficiency of their own procedure and assess the interinstitutional compatibility of processes.
A practical way of thinking about quality assessment that also applies well to courses in general is the PDCA cycle. PDCA stands for Plan, Do, Check and Act and implies that a concern with quality is present in every phase of a course. Below, you can find suggested action points for each phase of a PDCA cycle in a collaborative course context, but you must establish your own priorities and include your institutional requirements for quality management in your cycle.
Example of how the PDCA-cycle can work at a course level
Course Feedback from Students
Hearing the voice of students is vital for the development of collaborative courses and their quality assurance. As mentioned, asking course feedback from students is a well-established practice in many universities. The current way in Unite! Alliance, too, is to collect, process and store course feedback following primarily your own university's feedback procedures. This means that in collaborative courses it becomes integral to share and discuss these practises together with your partners to be able to find common ground. Also, data privacy practices are to be observed carefully if information is transferred between institutions.
Unite! encourages you to collect, process and store course feedback in accordance with your own university's feedback procedures
Generally, when starting to plan a collaborative course, feedback from previous iterations is always important to consider if it exists. The course feedback procedures for the new course should be planned in the early stages and informed to the students latest in the beginning of the course. The feedback should be collected throughout the course’s lifespan as teachers would then have time to react, giving students the opportunity to benefit from the feedback provided, and after the course to develop future iterations. There are many ways to integrate feedback collection into the teaching, such as assignments, discussions, feedback groups and small surveys. The end-of-the-course feedback, on the other hand, can be collected for example with an anonymous questionnaire. Below, you can find examples of feedback questions.
Student Feedback Template
Feedback is tightly intertwined with the course objectives, so the questions should reflect the objectives of your course. These questions are most often course specific and therefore to be added on top of templates. In case of collaborative courses, it is also extremely important to include questions that assess the added value of collaborative course as a format. In the example questions above, examples of these questions are marked with cursive. This perspective is often missing from questionnaires that are made for other than collaborative courses. In collaborative courses you should also think about adding relevant partner institution specific questions, if they are considered to provide information that has added value.
However, asking course feedback from students is one step, but what comes after that is even more important. There is no point in asking for feedback if it is not carefully reflected on. Therefore, you should take time to read and reflect it together with the collaborative course partners. It is especially important to see for example if there were differences in the student’s perceptions of whether their previous knowledge was sufficient, because this can be due to different backgrounds and can easily be addressed during the course and in future iterations. Some of the feedback and the planned development actions can be shared with the students as well and if the students have given feedback with their name, it is good to answer to that feedback straightly. The course feedback can also be used, at least to some extent, to evaluate the success of the international cooperation.
Keep in mind that there are always a lot of people who do not answer surveys. However, it can be useful to also look back to things such as the number of applications or the number of students who successfully finished the course. In collaborative courses, differences in these numbers between institutions are to be considered providing valuable information for future development as well.
Finally, the feedback that is collected during and right after a collaborative course reflects the immediate outcomes of the course, but it does not necessarily reveal its impact in the bigger picture. If information on impact is needed for quality management purposes, that should be collected sometime after the course ended, and with a different method.
Course Peer-assessment for Teachers
Students are the common focus point when it comes to quality assessment in courses, as they are seen as the ultimate beneficiary. However, collaborative courses are strongly characterized by the co-working efforts between teachers and institutions. Establishing a measure of successful cooperation at a teacher-to-teacher level is key to the viability and added value of collaborative courses.
Teaching assessment is typically part of university teachers’ career progression, and it is performed by a committee or pedagogical experts. But outside of this formal and punctual context, teaching can also be appraised and polished by making self and/or peer-assessment part of the quality cycle of your collaborative course.
In the context of international and interinstitutional cooperation, factors like course planning, work division and proper use of subject expertise also contribute to the overall success of the implementation and must be included in the course evaluation process. Below, you can find guiding statements that can be customized and used in, for instance, a course wrap-up session among teachers to facilitate a constructive dialogue about the co-development and co-teaching of your implementation.
Peer-assessment template
Recap list
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Collaborative courses must be assessed from different angles . Quality assessment for collaborative courses can include aspects like multiculturalism, interinstitutional cooperation and co-teaching efficiency in addition to traditional course quality assessment criteria.
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Unite! Network does not currently have a unified process for quality assessment at a course level.
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Course feedback is feedback that is collected during and after a specific course, from the students, to improve the course. The process of collecting course feedback should always be followed by analysing, reflecting, and, when necessary, acting on the given feedback. There are different methods for collecting feedback during and after a course, and course objectives should be considered in this decision-making.