Dialog
First dialogue meetings about the quality system
How does the organisation view the current quality system for education? Since August, dialogue meetings have been conducted with heads of programmes and administrative staff. Here’s a little about what we learned.
As a project group in the revision project, we have had the opportunity to speak with heads of programme and administrative at the faculties who support the programmes' work with the quality system locally.
Meetings have been held both faculty wise and across, and we have encountered a great interest in contributing to the revision work. We have also already received many useful suggestions and comments.
Dialogue and data support creates value - but there's room for improvement
At the dialogue meetings, there has generally been considerable support within the organisation for SDU to have a quality system that can support systematic work with objectives for teaching and education programmes. In particular, the meetings across programmes and faculties, where the concrete work with education quality is discussed and documented, were highlighted as something that contributes to creating value, and the possibility of data support was also highlighted as an important feature of the system.
Correspondingly, there were a number of recurring themes in terms of things in the quality system that could benefit from a service check in the audit process. Some themes concern very tangible issues (such as insufficient data or problematic benchmarks for quality); others are about structural conditions (such as the complexity of the system, the relationship between responsibilities and options for action, or response rates in teaching evaluations); and still others are about more abstract questions and values (such as the relationship between control and development and how the work with teaching and training is prioritised within the organisation).
Next step
Within the next few months, the project group will take the knowledge gained during the meetings with us when we start reviewing the content of the sub-policies and the other documents in the quality system. The goal is still to make the whole thing leaner and better adapted to the needs of the actors, but without revamping everything. During this process, we will invite groups of students and staff to discuss select themes that clearly are major concerns and which we need to learn more about. Stay tuned!
More info
Read more about the project and its background here. Also, feel free to contact Project Manager Caroline Schaffalitzky from SDU Student Services if you have any questions or other input regarding the work: csm@sdu.dk