Quality Assurance in Teaching and Learning
Quality Assurance in Teaching and Learning
Internal Evaluation regularly conducts surveys that yield results that can be used as a basis for improving degree programmes and teaching directly and for improving the services and event programmes delivered by various university units and facilities.
You will find information below on quality development processes in which Internal Evaluation is involved. Central questions dealt with here include:
- How are survey instruments prepared and fine-tuned?
- What happens to survey results?
- What alternatives to quantitative surveys are available?
Coordination of feedback instruments
- The questionnaires used centrally are discussed with the evaluation coordinators within each school and with department heads as well as with students and other involved parties (e.g. data privacy management, etc.) and adapted on an ongoing basis.
- Course evaluations can be conducted using questionnaires that are specific to a school, department, institute or course type.
Processing and distribution of results
- Information about the survey results is communicated to the Vice President for Teaching and Learning, the Presidential Board and the head of the Department for Study Affairs.
- The deans of studies in the schools receive aggregated evaluation results for the course evaluations, which are conducted in at least 25% of all courses held in each semester. They also receive the results of individual courses taught by staff members who have given their consent to this data being shared with them.
- Internal Evaluation prepares reports for each school with the school-specific results of all central surveys and presents them to school bodies and committees on request so that improvements can be derived from them and discussed.
- Internal Evaluation also supports the degree programme reviews conducted in the wider context of the system accreditation process by supplying specific evaluation results (fact sheets) for partial and full degree programmes based on data from the surveys of incoming students, current students and graduates.
- Advisory services and other service providers within the university (including the Study and Career Counselling Service (ZSKB), the Student Service Centre, and the International Office) receive anonymised evaluations of their provision that are used to identify action items for optimisation processes.
Qualitative feedback tools
- In addition to the regular quantitative evaluations of teaching, the Teaching Analysis Poll (TAP) is offered in cooperation with the university’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education unit. It is delivered in face-to-face and online courses and (as “bigTAP”) in large courses. Once the results have been processed, they can facilitate dialogue between students and lecturers about teaching and learning processes.
- Internal Evaluation can conduct focus groups as needed, for instance for degree programme development. These are group discussions led by a moderator and based on key questions defined in advance. The results are processed, anonymised and delivered to the client.