Quality tracking at Ravensbourne
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The project set out to support the process of institutional transformation as Ravensbourne College moves to purpose-built premises in North Greenwich. We aimed to demonstrate how emerging technologies can be used to help make institutional processes such as quality assurance and enhancement more efficient, engaging and effective.
Executive Summary
We sought to develop greater understanding of how 'Web 2.0' technologies can support the effective use of, and access to, administrative information and increase the efficiency of administrative processes by eliminating duplicate activities, and streamlining progress monitoring. We have also started to explore whether, if these processes are made more transparent, and are provided with more structure, better participation will follow.
The project implemented a small-scale platform for managing and tracking quality assurance and enhancement actions through standards-based aggregation. A commodity issue tracking system was adapted to manage action items from relevant quality assurance processes with a simple web-service client facilitating the extraction of actionable items from narrative documents into time delimited actions and tasks.
We have succeeded in modelling a Web 2.0 workflow to sustain diverse actionbased activities involved in the institutional administration and assurance of the quality of learning and teaching. This provides a demonstrator of the use of emerging technology to improve the efficiency and openness of administrative procedures. Specifically this has confirmed the benefits of RSS 2.0 and the possibilities offered by better structuring of information and narrative documents. The project has also highlighted a range of significant issues related to such institutional change and implementing innovation and enhancement generally.