Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

Accountability and Quality

The chief mechanism for tracking quality within the School of Computer Science is via the SET, SEM and SEC mechanisms. I am actively involved with SET and SEM and year on year scores can be found here with a discussion of them covered in the section on Evaluating Practice. However such surveys have to be treated with caution for numerous reasons and the University administration seems primarily concerned with ensuring that an individual's scores remain acceptable rather than in pushing for excellence or the identification of areas of weakness.

The School also employs a SEC (Student Evaluation of Course) questionnaire at the end of each degree course and uses this to evaluate the curriculum as a whole. In general the results from this have been satisfactory with no modules appearing to be universally liked or disliked and students generally happy with the balance of group work and individual work etc. within their degree. There does appear to be an issue with the balance of theory and applied modules but it is unclear exactly what the students mean by this (ie. is a theoretical module one with a high mathematical content or one with a low practical programming content?).

The School has an annual review of teaching in which such matters are discussed together with an overview of learning outcomes and and any other quality issues that have arisen through the year.

Obviously the School external examiners also consider the quality of examinations, marking and coursework and in general have given very positive responses to the quality of the School's modules although in recent years they have expressed some concerns over the nature of quality assurance controls between the Nottingham and Malaysia campuses.

As a school lecturer I am naturally involved to a greater or lesser extent in all these quality processes.

While individuals within the School are accountable to the School administration and external examiners there is relatively little accountability to students. The Staff Student consultative committee acts as a conduit for student discussion and complaints but there appears to be no onus placed upon staff to respond in any fashion to issues raised via this route.

In general I would say that issues of quality and accountability are left to the principles of individual staff members. This is very much in the spirit of the University as an institution of scholarship and collaborative critical enquiry but it is unclear to me how long this situation can remain in the current climate where all the rewards are for improving research and while teaching is only associated with punishments if its standards drop below a certain level. In fact, in my opinion, practitioners are encouraged, implicitly at least, to concentrate all their available effort on research and only pay as much attention to teaching quality as is required to avoid it becoming a source of complaint.