Background & context of Durban University

of Technology (DUT)

Quality promotion & assurance

Quality enhancement

Countdown & blow-up factors

Collaborative relationships

The quest for the Holy grail…

A merger of two technikons

influence of history

unintended consequences

impact of merger

prevailing institutional culture

Establishment of the CQPA & approach

adopted

what’s in a name?

our approach: resonance with ‘festinare

lente’ (Hodgkinson & Brown, 2003)

Retro- and prospective QA

Model for QPA

Retrospective and prospective quality

assurance (Biggs, 2001)

retrospective – looking back on

achievements & making judgments

accordingly

prospective – focus on teaching &

learning, congruent with developmental,

facilitative and transformative approaches

PlanPlan

ActAct

Resource Allocation

Strategic PlanEnrolment PlanAcademic Plan

Inst. Audit Improvement Plan

External

ReviewReview

Internal

ImproveImprove

STUDENTSTUDENT

A model for quality promotion and assurance

‘quality as transformation is central to the development of educationally-oriented models’ (Srikanthan & Dalrymple, 2007)

‘education managers and academics still do not understand that QA is something you do, not wrangle about, that to have a positive effect it needs to be motivated by the desire of the whole organisation, including support staff and students to create the best student learning experiences, the best research within the available resources’ (Doherty, 2008)

Quality teaching transforms students’ perceptions of their world, and the way they go about applying the knowledge to real world problems; it also transforms teachers’ conceptions of their role as teacher and the culture of the institution itself (Biggs 2001)

Dissolve the barriers between academic, administrative and support staff through discussion and sharing of information and through joint ownership of problems and solutions (Hodgkinson & Brown 2003)

Is a single definition of QE possible?

DUT: definition in the strategic goals (2009) build on established foundations for QA lead to transformative change grounded in a systems-level, collaborative

approach to understanding and improving the quality of the entire student experience

HEA definition (2008) process of taking deliberate steps at

institutional level to improve the quality of learning opportunities

Countdown: plan into action

Clarity of direction Leadership & support Linkages &

collaborative relationships

Foundation for QP & A Maturity in internal &

external environment for QA

Blow-up: efforts eroded or destroyed

Complexity of prevailing cultures

QA legacy Resistance to change –

comfort zone of current intellectual habits & routines

Cave mentality

Collaborative? Relationships

QE

Collaborative Collaborative relationshipsrelationships

Quality improvement of LTA practices

Reviews; accreditation; feedback processes

Curriculum design; pedagogy

The biggest challenge of all:

How to win the hearts and minds of the ordinary

academic, how to shift the perception of quality

assurance from one of external policing or central control

to one of internalised, individual, professional academic

responsibility, bringing with it the wish, intention and

means to do even better by one’s students.

Will this take another ten years? – at least.

Holy grails do sometimes take a while to find (Williams

2008).