New education quality policy
New education quality policy on the way
From quality control to quality culture
Status and structure
The Council for Education and the Executive Board have approved a revision of the existing quality policy. The new policy will take effect in the New Year, and an involvement process is now underway across the faculties to prepare for its implementation.
The new policy contains objectives in relation to three dimensions:
- Teaching
- Education
- University
The objectives will be implemented following a total of 11 milestones (including university pedagogy, high level of academic quality, relevant study programmes and the study environment), and all of the milestones are embodied in common standards for when we can say that our practices fulfil the objectives.
The policy is supplemented with descriptions of the distribution of responsibilities across the University and descriptions of the sources of knowledge that will inform the work on educational quality.
Overall, the new quality policy demonstrates that SDU has extensive experience with quality work as well as actors who are ready to operate within an embedded quality culture without requiring micromanagement.
What is different from the current policy?
Basically, with the new policy, we will continue with what is already good educational quality today. But the new policy does differ from the current policy in both content and form. For example, the responsibility that students, study boards and heads of departments have for educational quality is clearer, and it has generally been important to formulate the policy so that it is as easily accessible and relevant as possible for everyone.
This is what characterises the new policy:
- Structure: Based on the dimensions of Teaching, Education and University, the new quality policy takes the student’s perspective as its starting point rather than – as previously – the ideal educational journey.
- Quality objectives: The new formulation of objectives focuses on development and has no upper limit on quality, and any minimum requirements resembling checklists have been removed.
- Freedom and responsibility: Actors will have more room to manoeuvre in relation to how milestones and standards are to be realised.
- Simplicity: The forthcoming policy will contain fewer and less extensive documents – partly because supplementary principles and appendices are now incorporated into the policy itself.
- Transparency: It will be easier to identify and limit undue variance as there are more cross-sectional descriptions, and more elements have been specified (in terms of allocation of responsibilities and requirements for data bases and follow-up).
- Continuity: The quality policy will continue to meet the high standard of a mature system that has incorporated both regulatory requirements and key indicators.
The next steps: Tidying up and Implementation
In the coming months, adjustments will be made in the existing quality system. Some of the current supplementary documents will either become redundant (e.g. Principles for Study Start), need to be revised (e.g. Memorandum on key indicators for educational quality) or moved from the quality system to the work on SDU’s strategic objectives (e.g. Principles for Internationalisation).
The new objectives and standards of the quality policy itself must also be further specified in faculty implementations, which are local plans for how the work to achieve the objectives will take place. The design of these practical descriptions will take place at the individual faculties, where the study boards, the department councils and the academic councils will be involved in the coming months.
Would you like to know more?
If you have any questions about how the involvement process for formulating a local plan for the work on the new quality policy will take place at your faculty, please write to the head of the revision project Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell.
If you are curious about the new policy, you can find a test version here (in Danish, opens in a new tab).
