Quality Assurance in Education parallel session.

The first paper presented by Monica on peer observation in higher education as an agent of change in teaching and learning. The focus was on undergraduate and post graduate students with 40 teachers and 1200 students. The peer reviews were one element of quality. The literature that was reviewed discussed the practice of peer review, how to develop this, sharing practice, taking risks, how it was a powerful learning experience and how it can be inspiring. All aspects of teaching were observed. This was undertaken in a positive climate of dialogue and was open and collaborative leading to a critical friendship. Students were also included as partners. The teachers and students actions as peer reviewers were compared. The rationale for the project was pedagogic excellence and student empowerment and the balance between these. In the train the professor to teach document which is a European publication there were 16 recommendations and these referred to peer feedback.

Staff sessions were organised and there was a protocol and observation sheets that staff and students used. All were told to describe the observation rather than evaluate. There were lectures observed by 15 teacher and 97 students and tutorial classes by 9 teachers and 73 students. This meant that a total of 24 teachers were involved and 170 students. 50% of the teaching staff volunteered to be involved. A qualitative approach was used for the research. The results from the teacher observations showed that there was active student participation, real life cases used, enthusiastic teachers but also low engagement and no participation. There were suggestions for improvement which included more student engagement, provide extensive answers, call students by name, and use pre-class activities. The results from the student activities were loud clear speech and sessions were well planned. Weaknesses noted were extensive information was given in some sessions, some questions were unanswered and the topic was not clear. The discussion about the experiences with the reviewers outlined how the exchange of experiences was valuable but students needed more preparation to be reviewers.

The next paper was about maintaining relevance in education through precise assessment and was given by Kevin Smith. This was focused on engineering students who were mostly 20 years old. Teachers appeared to pay attention only to average levels so students missed key outcomes and students felt this was unfair. Some felt that all information about work on the course was available on the web and so why should they come to university if they did not want to work. The questions related to what should change and what kind of quality do we want? Students often come for traditional education and assessment models. The fixed assessment approach was balanced with predictability and risk. There were multiple objectives and students needed to move. There were defined layers of outcomes but assessment needed to assess the achievement of each outcome. Flexible assessment could make sure each student achieved the outcomes, all were defined in advance and they challenged the students. The class size was 25

Tak presented a review of lecture class evaluation items in a Japanese university. There was increasingly a focus on educational quality and instruction for new teachers. There was also support for improving the curriculum. The lecture class evaluation was a questionnaire which asked students what is needed for lecture improvements. The students felt the questions were too abstract and the timing for the evaluation was too late as well as just being a ritual. Adapting the system led to each lecture having a suitable questionnaire and at a time when changes could be made. To develop this the researcher reviewed 683 items on 49 university evaluation forms. He looked at what was asked, the allocation of questions to the topic and the words used. There were 18 topics overall with many similarities across institutions.

The effect of relational coordination in online education was presented next by Carmen. There are more mobile devices in the world than there are people as many have multiple devices now. This means new skills need to be learnt and training needs to be provided. Gittell 2009 offer a good framework to explain results in IT and factors that impact on technology. Relational coordination is based on mutual adjustment, teamwork and communication. Coordination was also based in relationships and the integration of tasks, respect for knowledge and sharing objectives. Small projects were undertaken with teachers working together with students to learn.