Abstract:

The education landscape in the European Union and at a global level is constantly changing. A clear trend in nearly all levels of education, but especially in the academic sector, is the shift from traditional teaching methods to more participatory approaches. This trend causes changes not only in didactic approaches and educational settings, but also to institutional frameworks. To keep pace with these changes most Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have installed evaluation strategies as part of their quality assurance programs. Most of these evaluation approaches are often very specific to the individual HEI and can’t truly serve in national or even international settings. The authors of this abstract worked together for the past 9 years in different EU-funded projects dealing with the conception, development and realization of international intensive programs and will report on their experiences with evaluation strategies used at their home institutions, complemented with the description of the evaluation approaches developed and used in the scope of the ERASMUS+ projects ICDC (InterCultural Design Camp) and CIGN (Creative Industries Global Network). The subject of the ICDC project was the conception and provision of a series of summer schools staffed with an international cohort of students and teachers from partner institutions dealing with project-oriented production of design artefacts. The CIGN project focussed on the identification of skills-gaps in the Creative Industries and the development of course materials addressing the identified gaps. In both projects the evaluation of developed course materials was a key aspect. The paper will present the developed evaluation systems and discuss their application in an international context.

To provide a further international perspective, the paper will discuss the administration of, analysis of and use of the results of the widely-administered National Survey of Student Engagement. Since 1998 first and fourth year undergraduate students in American and Canadian colleges and universities have been asked to participate in the survey. The paper will examine the use of survey results for academic planning at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Finally, the authors will address the ‘Big Data’ trend, which is presently becoming increasingly important. The paper will report about the LAPS (Learning Analytics für Prüfungsleistungen und Studienerfolg) project conducted at Stuttgart Media University (HdM). LAPS is a database application that analyses study progress data from former students and compares these with the data from active students with the aim to take measures to individually support the academic success of students. To that the LAPS database contains anonymised demographic data, study progress and audit results. This data is used to calculate statistical probabilities for study success. Additionally, LAPS can reveal the factors and measures potentially relevant for a successful study. The paper will describe the LAPS project in more detail, and evaluate the first experiences gained at HdM with the use of the system.

Keywords:

Evaluation, student feedback, learning analytics, higher education.