Abstract:

The University of Lisbon (UL), located in the capital city of Portugal, has currently an estimated number of 22.000 students and a teaching staff of 1.800 professors and researchers. The university is organized in 11 Faculties/Institutes: Faculty of Fine Arts, Law, Medicine, Dental Medicine, Letters, Pharmacy, Psychology, Sciences, and the Institutes of Education, of Geography and Territorial Planning and of Social Sciences.
The Curricular Unit evaluation system is integrated in the Quality Assurance policy, and responds to the emerging need of appraisal of the learning-teaching process, as it has been proclaimed by the Bologna convention. In the UL we have created an on-line survey that is to be applied in the last semester of 2009/10 (Feb-Jul, 2010). It was created from a paper model that was difficult to apply and to use due to the gap of time between collecting the data and its analysis.
The unit evaluation system is universal to the university and mandatory to all students and teachers: to students by imposing this as a requirement to the enrolment in the next year; to the teachers, because it is in the University’s teachers rules - The student’s evaluation of the unit has an indirect effect on the teacher’s performance appraisal. Nonetheless, the evaluation process is completely anonym and confidential. The teacher will not have access to the names of the students who appraises his/hers performance.
The call for the inquiry is made at the end of the semester. The questionnaire is in an on-line form in which the student/teacher can access in the university facilities or at home. The user can easily access the platform with his/her identification number and date of birth, he/she then gets access to the list of curricular units that he/she attended (concerning the students) or that he/she has lectured (concerning the teachers).
To guarantee one extensive evaluation of the unit, both questionnaires (teacher/student) are similar and focus on the same points: organization and structure of the unit, supporting materials, tutoring hours, type of classes (lecture, practical ….), advised literature, on-line platforms, amongst others.
As it is an on-line questionnaire, the database stores automatically the answers of each participant. When the data is processed we will be able to compare results from students and teachers, allowing a broader perspective of how the unit is perceived by these two actors that are interrelated. Additionally, since the questionnaire is applied in the whole University we will be able to compare data from different faculties, years and courses. A detailed report of the results is given to the Director of each Faculty/Institute and to the Rector’s team. It’s up to the Director to decide how to present these results to the teachers: individually or in a public report. It will be interesting to have feedback and to analyse the comparison between the expected and obtained results. With this data, we will facilitate management decisions and make possible the definition of standards. We intend to, in the future, publicly allow access to these reports in a dedicated area of our site, as part of the University policy of transparency and accountability.
Based on the notion of reengineering the university internal evaluation processes, and with the goal of using electronic forms and dematerializing these procedures, we consider that we this was a significant step to reinforce our university’s quality assurance program.

Keywords:

Quality Assurance, Curricular Unit evaluation, on-line survey.