Today an important new tradition was launched in the Ihresalen lecture hall at the English Park Campus. Uppsala University held its first annual conference on educational evaluation, with more than 200 participants. The conference will be an annual feature of Uppsala’s new quality assurance system for education.
In Uppsala University’s model of educational evaluation, the responsibility for the design, implementation and follow-up of educational evaluation rests with the disciplinary domain/faculty boards. The model has two components: annual systematic follow-up of education, and educational evaluations by an external reviewer every sixth year. The annual follow-up is part of the domains’ responsibility for the quality of their educational programmes and forms an integral part of the model. The more comprehensive external evaluations are intended to assure and enhance the quality of educational programmes, with the overarching purpose being to achieve the University’s general goal of offering educational programmes of the highest national and international standard. Read the guidelines for the system here (in Swedish).
In February 2018 the faculties will present their plans for the evaluation of all their programmes over a six-year period. Ten pilot evaluations have been carried out in 2017. Experience and results from these pilot evaluations were presented at the conference. Experiences differ in detail but one thing almost all had in common was that the local educational environments had felt strong ownership and felt that the process of working on educational evaluation in itself enhanced quality. The enthusiasm was palpable.
It’s pleasing and promising that a University-wide conference on educational evaluation attracts so many enthusiastic participants. It’s a joy to see teachers, students, directors of studies, degree programme coordinators, senior faculty administrators, deans and others from every part of our broad University working together and exchanging experiences on how we can make our educational programmes even better!