Abstract:

Over the last two decades, higher education in Poland has been subject to dynamic changes. Universities are places for the creation and dissemination of knowledge at the highest level, and therefore can be considered a kind of moderators of economic growth. However, they are not free from problems. Studies on problems plaguing Polish higher education emphasize issues related to the maladjustment of education to the needs of the labor market and low grades of the entire didactic process. Moreover, the issue of the quality of education is one of the priorities implemented, both at the European and national policy levels. Quality in higher education is understood as a multi-dimensional, multi-level and dynamic concept that relates to the mission and goals of an institution, as well as to specific standards within a given system, entity, program or scientific discipline. Evaluation helps to ensure the quality of education. It is related both to improving the quality of educators' work and the implementation of the objectives set out in the strategic programs of individual higher education units in terms of improving the quality of their work.

There is no single, universally applicable model of evaluation of the education process, each university prepares its tools and mechanisms for making this evaluation and using the results in the process of improving the quality of education. It is more common to combine the term "quality" with the term "effectiveness". This is due to the tendency to individualize the functions of particular universities (e.g. educating the elite, disseminating higher education, education for the local market, education for the European market, etc.). The obtained evaluation effect may depend on the applied solutions. They should be related to the goals set by the university (e.g. provide feedback to the staff, whether it is an element of the HR policy, whether it is a material supporting decisions on undertaking specific studies or conducting specific courses, etc.).

While the conviction that it is necessary to provide high-quality education in higher education is a truism, a reflection on the method of evaluation of didactics seems justified. The current observation of the functioning of universities in Poland (but not only) indicates that despite the introduction of evaluation at universities on an increasingly larger scale, it is still not common to treat students as clients of an educational institution or as a unit that contributes to the unique community that the university is supposed to be.

The aim of our speech will be a presentation of the evaluation model realized at a regional university in Poland, at the University of Zielona Gora and to present the diversity of the obtained assessments of this process in the perspective of time (also taking into account the moments of remote work forced by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic) and due to the characteristics of the evaluated departments . We want to illustrate the mechanisms of using evaluation at this university in the adopted process of ensuring the quality of education. Mainly those related to the assessment of the learning process itself, and to a lesser extent focused on outcomes. Our analyzes, made on the basis of the results of evaluation measurements from 2013-2021, will allow us to enrich the existing catalogs of good evaluation practices.

Keywords:

Evaluation, quality of higher education, didactic process, effectiveness of education.