Here’s what we’re thinking about.
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
“Evaluators lay reality bare with all the scientific means they have, in the most systematic way that can be applied to a specific project.” (pg. 13)
Levin-Rozalis, M. (2003). Evaluation and research: Differences and similarities. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 18(2), 1-32.
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.
Your next read?
While working on a paper for a course on change management in education settings, I went back to a favourite of mine, Scholarship Reconsidered, an oldy but a goody, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and written by Ernest Boyer in 1990. Boyer walks his reader through a history of the American university system from the 1600s to the post-war years in order to explain the (then current) state of scholarly activities in American universities. Boyer advocates for a paradigm that recognises four kinds of scholarship: discovery, teaching, application and integration.
Scholarship of Discovery is the act of undertaking pure research on any topic. Scholarship of Teaching was considered by Boyer to be the use of research and best practice to teach well.* Scholarship of Application is the creation of new knowledge with and for a certain group. Scholarship of Integration is the collection of knowledge by experts and finding new meaning from a plethora of voices. (*Scholarship of Teaching has an asterisk behind it because Boyer’s definition is now considered scholarly teaching, not Scholarship of Teaching. Glassic, Huber and Maeroff’s 1997 work, Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate, updated the definition of Scholarship of Teaching to be the generation of new knowledge about pedagogy and learning.)
The value of Boyer’s initial work is that it helped conceptualise the many different ways that scholars approach their work, and adds legitimacy that may originally have been lacking from projects that weren’t viewed as ‘the right kind of research.’ I’ve always enjoyed Boyer’s writing style and am appreciative of the thought leadership he demonstrated with this work.
References:
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship revisited: Priorities of the professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T. & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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.
Your next read?
I came across an article that may help clarify the quality assurance landscape in Canada, and thought to share it in case people are looking for information about the differences between internal quality assurance activities within higher education institutions (HEIs) and approval/accreditation reviews. Here’s the authors’ abstract:
Under the Canadian constitution, responsibility for education is assigned to the provinces. In some provinces, universities are based in institution-specific statutes, in others, in system-wide legislation. Except for the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, the provinces leave the quality assurance of academic activities to the universities. In the last 15 years, the post-secondary landscape has become more complex. Four provinces have enabled non-degree-granting colleges to offer specific degree programs on the basis of government approval; three have transformed colleges into universities; four permit external universities, public and private, and new private universities based in Canada to offer programs. Though the innovative provinces established quality assurance agencies to screen programs and organizations, the new degrees met resistance from many public universities, which, in the absence of a national accrediting body, took the position that they would only recognize degrees from institutions belonging to their own promotional national body, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Though the new agencies have published both academic standards and rigorous external review procedures, this response from the public universities in effect marginalized the new degree programs and providers. Thus, the state of quality assurance in higher education in Canada is in a state of flux. This article reviews the state of quality assurance activity across the country in both public universities and in the new quality assurance agencies. It concludes with reflections on the challenge of inserting new degrees and new kinds of degree-granting institutions into a framework of academic legitimacy that all players will accept.
Baker, D. N., & Miosi, T. (2010). The quality assurance of degree education in Canada. Research in Comparative and International Education, 5(1), 32–57. https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2010.5.1.32