UCL CENTRE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

Details

• Author(s): Dr Jane Hughes
• Title: Quality in Higher Education
  
• Subject: HE - Education
• Keywords: UKOER, UKPSF, OMAC, CPD4HE, teaching quality, quality management, quality assurance, quality enhancement, student learning experience, e-learning, peer observation of teaching, interdisciplinary teaching
• Language(s): English
• Material type(s): Text
  
• File format(s): ZIP, HTML, PDF, DOC
  
• File size: Various
• Publish Date: 31st October 2011
  
• Licence: CC-BY-SA

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Licence

Quality in Higher Education by Dr Jane Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.ucl.ac.uk.

Introduction

These materials have been used in the second module of a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

In the first module, participants had considered ways in which they could develop and improve their teaching by obtaining feedback from their students and through observing and being observed by peers. The resources here move the focus to a programme, department or institutional level.

Overview of Content

The first resource is an exploratory activity that considers different perspectives on the ‘Quality’ of HE teaching and learning. It has been used, in different ways, as preparation for discussion in a face-to-face workshop. The second contains suggested activities based around a single document. The document is about institutional approaches to peer observation of teaching and, particularly, changes that might be needed in order to take account of an increase in technology-enhanced learning and new interdisciplinary courses.

Licence

Quality in Higher Education by Dr Jane Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.ucl.ac.uk.

Institutional Approaches to Peer Observation of Teaching

Below is a document presented to an institutional committee whose responsibility was the management and enhancement of teaching quality. The name of the institution has been edited out.

Read the document and consider the following questions. You may wish to write down answers or to discuss the questions with a colleague.

1. What view of the purpose of Peer Observation appears to underpin the document? What other purposes are possible? How are these alternative views likely to affect the process?

2. What problems with Peer Observation does the document identify? Does this accord with your own experience?

3. What are the reasons for dissatisfaction with the current scheme in this institution? To what extent do you think these apply in your own institution?

4. Describe the Peer Observation of Teaching scheme (if there is one) in your own institution.

5. How have you experienced this in action? (Have you acted as an observer and/or been observed?)

6. Read one of the references at the end of the document and draw out of it one action point for your institution or for yourself.

Revision of Peer Observation of Teaching guidelines

Summary

There is a need to revise the Peer Observation of Teaching guidelines for staff, in order to take account of the increase in both online learning and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Amendments are therefore proposed to the Peer Observation Guidelines for staff, with additional changes of wording in the Institutional Policy Documentation. However, the developments mentioned above have implications that suggest a more fundamental review of Peer Observation of Teaching processes could be timely. Specifically, the observation of an individual teaching event might be absorbed into a wider-ranging and more flexible scheme.

Implications of the growth in e-learning

By the end of this year, all taught courses are expected to have a presence in the institutional VLE. It therefore seems essential that our quality management and enhancement processes, including Peer Observation of Teaching (PoT), should consider the role of the VLE in the students’ learning. A few of our courses are taught wholly online but the majority mix online and face-to-face learning in varying proportions. In such cases, even when the observed event is a lecture, the discussion and reflection that are part of the peer observation process should address the relationship between student online activity and the observed face-to-face event. Furthermore, since PoT in the institution is intended to support professional development, a lecturer might wish to make the online element of a course the main focus of observation. Again, unless a course is taught wholly online, considering the relationship with face-to-face learning would be a key part of the process.

The need to include the observation of online activity is beginning to be acknowledged in HE institutions, particularly with regard to distance learning, and some guidance is available in the literature (for example, Swinglehurst et al., 2008; Bennet and Barp, 2008). Issues to consider include:

• Providing access to online course components for observers; negotiating the observer’s level of access and considering the implications for students.
• Tailoring the scheme for blended learning as well as distance learning contexts
• Defining the time boundaries of an online peer “observation”
• Ensuring that e-learning that does not use the VLE can also be considered
• Providing for possible participation in the peer observation process of non-teaching staff whose work has an impact on the student learning experience
• Providing appropriate professional development and training for participating staff
• Providing supporting documents, such as observation checklists; ensuring that these are consistent with guidelines on both VLE use and learning, teaching and assessment more broadly.

Implications of an increase in interdisciplinary teaching

The current institutional guidelines give Heads of Departments primary responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the implementation of PoT. Recent developments, such as restructuring departments and faculties into larger ‘schools’, already call this into question. Interdisciplinary courses provide additional complexity, for example:

Who is responsible for monitoring the process and to whom do they report? Where is the enhancement of quality in an interdisiciplinary course best discussed? Can the observer and observed be from different departments? How can peer observation contribute to development of a course as a whole?

Proposed changes to PoT guidelines

A small number of changes to the wording of statements in the Quality documentation would make the scheme more flexible and help to accommodate both interdisciplinary teaching and online learning. An additional statement could also be inserted to make explicit the requirement to consider online learning during the peer observation process.

Changes to guidelines for participating teaching staff are also proposed. The need to consider the relationship between online and face-to-face learning in discussion and reflection should be stated. Subject to relevant committtee approval, online learning will be included in the list of teaching “events” that may be observed. An additional sample observation checklist has been developed and should be added to the online support materials. It is proposed that central learning & teaching support services work together in order to develop further guidance materials and staff development activities to support the observation of online learning.

Possible alternative models

HE institutions all seem to face similar challenges in implementing an institution-wide PoT scheme (Gosling and O’Connor, 2009). These include: variable compliance; tensions between different perceptions of the purpose of the scheme; uncertainty about the impact on practice and about whether the observer or observed benefits more; the exclusion of staff who influence student learning but do not actually teach; conflict between the requirement for confidentiality and a desire for visible outcomes and reporting. Whilst still adhering to the basic principles of our PoT scheme, it would be possible to modify it, so that it would both accommodate more complex teaching contexts, such as interdisciplinary courses and blended learning, and address some of these issues.

Some HE institutions are moving towards schemes of peer-supported review or enquiry into teaching, in which participants consider an agreed topic rather than a single teaching event. These tend to be more flexible than a traditional PoT scheme, but typically follow a similar pattern: an initial meeting to negotiate the scope and focus of the enquiry and to agree on the evidence to be considered; the collection of evidence (which might or might not include observation of teaching); a further meeting to discuss the evidence and consider what has been learned. Some schemes allow the enquiry to involve a group of staff, such as a course team, rather than a pair. Swinglehurst et al., 2008 present an example of this.

A number of benefits are claimed for this type of peer-supported teaching enquiry, including:

• The focus on topic rather than performance, reduces anxiety;
• It can contribute to department or course development as well as to individual professional development, since outcomes can be reported and discussed
• The Head of Department can influence the agenda, for example by asking all staff to focus their enquiry/review on a topic of common concern, such as assessment.
• The process is suitable for groups as well as pairs of staff and can include non-teaching staff who influence the student learning experience.
• The use of a research-like process strengthens the link between teaching and research and encourages a scholarly approach to teaching

It should be noted, however, that none of these alternative approaches is guaranteed to resolve institutional problems with a PoT scheme and some of them appear to demand a significant increase in staff time commitment.

The Committee is asked to consider whether a modification of the PoT scheme, along these lines, might be appropriate.

References

Bennet, S. and Barp, D. (2008) Peer Observation – a case for doing it online. Teaching in Higher Education, 13 (5), pp.559-70

Gosling, D. and O’Connor , K. M. (2009) Beyond the Peer Observation of Teaching. SEDA Paper 124, Staff and Educational Development Association, August 2009

Swinglehurst, D., Russell, J. and Greenhalgh, T. (2008). Peer Observation of Teaching in the Online Environment: an action research approach. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 24, pp 282-292.

Licence

Quality in Higher Education by Dr Jane Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.ucl.ac.uk.

Perspectives on Quality in Higher Education

This is an exploratory activity that considers different perspectives on the ‘Quality’ of HE teaching and learning.

When originally conceived, the resources were designed to generate questions that course participants would put to two senior members of staff with quality responsibilities in the institution. This was probably the most successful use of the activities.

They have also been used as pre-workshop activities, to prepare learners for a discussion in a face-to-face session. Questions and comments arising from the activity were either posted to a forum or added to a wiki before the session.

A. National quality assurance in HE

Questions

1. What is the purpose/function of the Quality Assurance Agency?

2. What mechanisms does it employ in order to fulfil its function?

3. Any other points of interest?

Resources

Use these websites as starting points:

• Quality Assurance Agency - http://www.qaa.ac.uk/
• Subject benchmark statements - http://www.qaa.ac.uk/AssuringStandardsAndQuality/subject-guidance/SubjectBenchmarkStatements/Pages/default.aspx
• Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF) - http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/enhance/tqef.asp

B. Quality from the student perspective

Questions

1. Scope: what is 'quality' from the student perspective?

2. What measures of quality and what evaluation methods are used to judge quality from the student perspective?

3. Other points of interest?

Resources

• Unistats - the website that reports the results of the National Student Survey - http://www.unistats.com/
• The student course experience questionnaire (SCEQ) - used quite widely in HE, especially in Australia. UK universities using the SCEQ include Oxford. This link is to the University of Sydney SCEQ page: http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/SCEQ/sceqAbout.htm
• §HEA resources on "the student experience": http://search.heacademy.ac.uk/kb5/hea/search/resources.page?qt=student+experience&sb=0&sortfield=relevance . You will probably want to refine the search, perhaps by looking for one aspect of the student experience or for resources about your own discipline. You will not have time to investigate all of these in any depth but they give an indication of the range of resources available.

C. Institutional approaches to quality management and enhancement

Questions

1. Scope: what does the word 'Quality' encompass in HE institutions?

2. What mechanisms do universities use for enhancing quality?

3. What mechanisms do universities use for monitoring and managing quality?

4. Any other points of interest?

Resources

There are four links to relevant university web pages as starting points. You should also look at relevant documents from your own institution. Try to investigate additional institutions in and outside the UK.

• University of Exeter: http://as.exeter.ac.uk/support/admin/staff/qualityassuranceandmonitoring/tqamanual/
• University of Sydney project on teaching quality : http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/eqa/
• University of Liverpool: http://www.liv.ac.uk/tqsd/
• University of Warwick: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/academicoffice/quality

D. Other perspectives on quality in teaching and learning

Questions

1. What is meant by 'Quality' in the education press?

2. What is meant by 'Quality' in the popular press? It might be useful to consider what would constitute “poor quality” from this perspective.

3. What is meant by 'Quality' in the view of employers and/or professional bodies?

4. Is there a scholarly or research-based view of 'quality'

5. What is the trade union perspective on quality management?

Remember that our context is teaching and learning but if you think it is relevant, by all means include reference to research quality.

Resources

These are starting points. You should look for others; perhaps you could compare newspapers from different countries.

• Times Higher Education Supplement: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/
• Guardian Education: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education
• The Sun newspaper: http://www.thesun.co.uk/search/searchAction.do?query=education&view=internal&pubName=sol&submit=+Search+
• The University and College Union (UCU): http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm

Licence

Quality in Higher Education by Dr Jane Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.ucl.ac.uk.