Food for thought

Statistics Canada's 2025 Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating raises important concerns for quality assurance systems that depend on volunteer peer reviewers. Between 2018 and 2023, Canada's overall volunteer rate declined from 79% to 73%, while total volunteer hours fell by 18%, from 5.0 billion to 4.1 billion hours. Formal volunteering—activities performed through organizations—experienced an even steeper decline, dropping from 41% to 32% of Canadians and resulting in a 28% reduction in formal volunteer hours. These findings suggest that organizations relying on skilled volunteer professionals face increasing challenges in recruiting and retaining qualified reviewers.

For accreditation and quality assurance organizations, this trend has significant implications. Peer-review systems depend on experienced practitioners who volunteer their expertise to evaluate programs, ensure accountability, and promote continuous improvement. As the pool of volunteers shrinks, organizations may experience difficulties maintaining reviewer capacity, increasing the workload placed on a smaller group of dedicated individuals. This concentration of responsibilities raises concerns about reviewer fatigue, burnout, and the long-term sustainability of volunteer-based quality assurance models. Statistics Canada also found that the top 10% of volunteers contributed 61% of all volunteer hours, indicating an increasing reliance on a relatively small number of highly committed individuals.

The report highlights the need for quality assurance organizations to rethink how they recruit, support, and retain peer reviewers. Strategies such as reducing administrative burden, providing flexible participation options, recognizing volunteer contributions, and investing in reviewer development may become increasingly important. Without proactive efforts to strengthen volunteer engagement, declining volunteerism could threaten the effectiveness, representativeness, and resilience of peer-review systems that underpin accreditation and quality assurance across professional and post-secondary education sectors.

Your next read?

If you aren’t already a subscriber, I highly recommend you check out Higher Education Strategy Associate’s One Thought to Start Your Day newsletter. Penned (usually) by HESA’s Alex Usher, this blog provides insights into the higher education industry in Canada, and around the world. Usher’s biting whit comes through more often than not, and he gives his readers a ‘behind the scenes’ sense of what’s happening in universities and colleges.

He recent wrote a few articles about the bureaucratization of the higher education environment and the additional strain faculty face when they are required to take on roles other than research and teaching. I found the following passage incredibly relevant to the work Noctua Consulting does, and for our clients, when he explored the value of taking administrative duties away from faculty and giving them to others in the ecosystem:

To be clear, we aren’t talking about people who “tell professors what to do” in terms of assessment... But instead of having every professor or every department re-invent the wheel in these areas, it probably makes sense to have people who can act as assistants and advisers, and make what might seem painful tasks less painful. And the result will probably be better for students as well.

 What I am proposing here is to find ways to allow professors to focus on their jobs as content experts, both in research and instruction. Overall, they are simply too valuable and expensive to have them doing stuff that takes away from those roles.

I think I’ve reminded every one of my clients that they are content experts in their field, and my role as an external consultant is to free up their time to do their jobs, not the administrative minutia that can accompany program quality assurance activities.

I highly recommend you check out the blog entries in their entirety for an interesting look at what could be. Then reach out to Noctua Consulting to make that possibility a reality.

Reducing Work (Higher Education Strategy Associated Blog, February 14, 2023)

Improving Quality Without Increasing Professional Workloads (Higher Education Strategy Associated Blog, February 15, 2023)

Food for thought

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And God saw everything that He made. "Behold," God said, "it is very good." And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And on the seventh day God rested from all His work. His archangel came then unto Him asking, "God, how do you know that what you have created is 'very good'? What are your criteria? On what data do you base your judgment? Aren't you a little close to the situation to make a fair and unbiased evaluation?" God thought about these questions all that day and His rest was greatly disturbed. On the eighth day God said, "Lucifer, go to hell."

Thus was evaluation born in a blaze of glory. (pg. 1)

Patton, M. Q. (2008). Utilization-focused evaluation (4th ed.). Sage Publication.

The new “s-word” for program quality assurance evaluations

Is there anything more disheartening that hearing ‘but we’ve always done it that way’ when you’re looking to make improvements to your program?  Look, I get that humans are more comfortable with the status quo; it pre-supposes what they’ve been doing is good and keeps change at bay, both of which are very reassuring to a person.

But I think we need to consider ‘status quo’ as the new s-word when it comes to a program’s evaluation.  The context a program began in is very unlikely to be the same over time, so the base assumptions that were made during the set-up need to be evaluated for relevance.  We also need to consider program staff; turn over in the workplace is a fact of life and new blood brings new ideas, goals and skills that may be underutilized if a reliance on the status quo is in place.  Finally, to suggest that anything we do is perfect is a deeply flawed quirk of humanity; humans make mistakes, we learn from them and we can do better.

I’m not advocating for throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Not at all.  What I’m saying is that the concept of the status quo should be viewed as taboo in program quality assurance activities – removing the footing of ‘but we’ve always done it that way’ may make some people feel a little shaky, but I’d suggest it was a tenuous foundation (at best) to be resting on anyway.  A thorough quality assurance evaluation may raise some areas that require improvement, but it will allow you confirm that your program is on solid footings moving forward.