Abstract:

Students and teachers are minor actors in an educational quality assurance system like e.g. the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area [1]. On the other hand, they are the main actors when creating quality enhancement in practice. It is well established historically that educational change processes in universities have been hard to manage and that they require trustful relations between management and teachers to be successful [2]. However, change processes require trust among all parts involved in the process [3] and students have so far not been included.

Here, we present a good example of a strategy for student-teacher interaction with the focus on enhancing programme quality while keeping a trustful relation both between students and teachers and between teachers themselves. At the heart of this strategy lies a regular short programme level student questionnaire. Students are encouraged to anonymously write down whatever opinions they have about their courses and about their study programme. The responses are jointly evaluated by the programme director and student representatives. Teachers are informed about responses related to their courses and students are notified about main outcomes from the evaluation in order to ensure a trustful relation between them and the faculty. Urgent issues are handled swiftly or investigated more thoroughly either at course level or at programme level and strategic issues are either brought directly to collegial discussions among teachers or to discussions among students to create important input to later faculty discussions.

In this work, we will describe the questionnaire and the quality enhancement strategy together with some examples of actual change created so far. We will also discuss how our work relates to the top-down process of quality assurance and the bottom-up process of quality enhancement and how to handle the difference between them. Finally, we will reflect on the role of the student questionnaire for creating trust among students and teachers during the change process.

References:
[1] Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). (2015). Brussels, Belgium. (ISBN: 978-9-08-168672-3)
[2] Graham, R. (2012). Achieving excellence in engineering education: the ingredients of successful change. The Royal Academy of Engineering, London, UK. (ISBN 1-903496-83-7)
[3] Lines, R., Selart, M., Espedal, B., and Johansen, S.T. (2005). The production of trust during organizational change, Journal of Change Management 5, 221-245.

Keywords:

Quality enhancement, educational change, student involvement, quality assurance, system approach.