Internal Quality
Assurance Practice in
Slovakia-some Remarques
Jan Bujnak
University of Zilina
Slovakia
jan.bujnak@fstav.uniza.sk
Partners involved:
-Students: knowledge in the chosen field, good
degree, diplomas
-Employers: qualified and trained graduates
-University: enough knowledge, skills to study
-Teachers: appropriate knowledge from the previous
courses,
-Society: educated and responsible people.
Different approaches to the quality in education:
- Quality from the didactic point of view –
optimization of the teaching and learning process,
- Quality from the economic point of view –
education costs,
- Quality from the social point of view – social
demand for education,
- Quality from the consumer point of view – demand
of students, employers, parents,
Quality from the management point of view –
optimization of organization of education.
Issues to control:
-
Teaching methods,
Tutorial methods-students with learning difficulty,
Students feedback,
Monitoring of students progress,
Checks of student needs meeting,
Student progress assessment
Techniques of control:
- student´ questionnaires,
- external stakeholders, employers, and professional
bodies,
- meeting of course/field committees,
- meeting of subject boards,
Who:
Administration,
Staff development units,
Quality assurance divisions.
What:
-Evaluation of student knowledge to determine the
quality of teaching and learning
-level of knowledge, skills and habits necessary for
future occupations
-variety of methods and means of revision
determined by individual study programs
How:
Student's feedback can be provided in several ways:
-individual discussions during consultation hours or
friendly dialogues,
-discussions in seminars – group attitude,
-mutual discussions of teachers to share experiences,
-mutual observations of lectures or seminars,
-tutors playing a role of intermediary between groups
and the management,
-participation of students in management meetings,
-regularly meetings of management and students
communities,
-questionnaires
Management should check:
- credits systems, especially in the first two years,
- content of new subjects, their continuity with
other subject,
- overlapping of contents of different subjects,
-quality of study materials,
-organization of exams, especially during the last
year of study.
Advantage of using questionnaires:
-easily distributed, collected, evaluated, finding out
opinions of great number of students at the same
time,
-easily gaining information about teacher's work,
-to help teachers to better recognize the content
or difficulty of the lectures, seminars and
exercises,
-to motivate the students to participate in solving
real problems,
Critical objectives to questionnaires:
-non-objective evaluation because on
dependency on such variable as sympathy,
degree of acceptability, size of group and the
way of interpretation,
-influence of facts as the gender of
respondent, looks of rooms,
-concentration only on the negative features
of teacher's work, respondents ignorance.
Basic considerations:
-Who will organize the measurementparliement, employers, external agency.
teachers, students
-Who made questionnaires,
-questionnaires is voluntary, semi-voluntary or
obligatory,
-used in every group or in every subject,
-time-table in organizing,
standard or non-standard form.
Very brief and effortless questionnaire with only 3
questions:
-What were the BEST features of the course
-What were the WORST feature of the course,
-In what ways the course could be improved.
If we expect student´s suggestions:
-content of subject,
-methodology of the lecture interpretation,
-intensity of subject,
-level of providing with study materials,
-way of continuous assessment during semester,
-condition of obtaining credits, exams.
The complex questionnaire:
-man or female,
-accommodation,
-study success,
-study conditions,
-teaching methodology,
-difficulty of subject,
-comparison with the other similar subject,
-study material available,
-relation to previous and following subjects,
-percentage of your attendance,
-weekly hours of self-study,
-is the number of teaching hours sufficient,
level of difficulty of exams,
-suggestion for improvement.