Quality Tracking at Ravensbourne
Ravensbourne College is a small, specialist institution serving the creative industries of design and communication. These disciplines are undergoing radical, disruptive change as a result of the introduction of digital technology. Learners typically have a relatively high level of technological sophistication, and the institution actively encourages the use of learner-owned technology and extra-institutional social software in learning and teaching. Ravensbourne is relocating to purpose built premises in North Greenwich in 2010. This building is designed around learner- and practitioner-owned technology, modelling the networked environment of the creative professional.
Ravensbourne have been developing their approach to elearning and are moving towards a personal learning environment that enables learners to assemble a rich learning experience from content available in the institution, and from extra-institutional resources and communities of practice. They have already moved a long way in this through an ongoing JISC supported project (LIN-R). It has become clear that an important institutional contribution to the learner’s personal learning environment is the quality assurance of the institution’s learning experiences. Further engaging learners in this process by making it more transparent and ongoing can add an important layer to the personalisation of learning and benefit the institution.
Characteristically, quality assurance and enhancement is an enterprise process that is centrally managed with the results being shared with stakeholders at critical points. On the face of it an enterprise process is less amenable to the loosely-coupled, user-selected world of Web 2.0, particularly a process that aims to promote and uphold standards. However, because effective quality assurance requires openness – learners, practitioners and other stakeholders should be able to see quality assurance processes at work, that improvements are made, and errors corrected, they should be able to measure for themselves a process of improvement and engage with this in an ongoing way. While they already strive for this as an institution they see an opportunity for the publication and dissemination of quality-assurance related activities to take advantage of the networked world of Web 2.0. In addition, visible, tangible progress encourages a responsive institution.
Furthermore, visible quality assurance helps to create an institutional culture of continuous enhancement that draws on the expertise and experience of administrators, practitioners and learners. It is important in fostering an institutional culture that is reflective, self-critical, and evidence-based.
At Ravensbourne College, there are three important processes that contribute to the quality enhancement of teaching and learning – external examiners’ reports, the annual course monitoring process, and learner feedback at course committees. The first two processes are used to create action plans for quality enhancement. Course committees generate discrete action items. Over the course of the year the teaching team and support departments carry out these actions, and report progress at faculty committees.
Inevitably, other priorities supervene, and, over time, action items drop off to-do lists. Subject leaders are reminded before meetings of any outstanding items, and scramble to address them. Actors are well intentioned but overburdened, and quality is enhanced through a process of punctuated equilibrium. Learners, and external stakeholders, are often unaware of progress being made, and the lack of visible progress can lead to a rolling undercurrent of dissatisfaction and discontent.
These problems will become progressively exacerbated as learners and practitioners assemble their own environments. The absence of at least semi-structured information about the progress of quality assurance and enhancement means there is no feed for an aggregator. Stakeholders stand “outside the conversation”, decoupled from the institution’s processes, uniformed and disempowered.
Ravensbourne aims to adapt commodity issue-tracking or project management web applications to manage quality action plans. They will create a simple tool that makes use of a web service to create tasks from narrative documents. Task deadlines will be syndicated using iCalendar feeds, and progress using RSS feeds. The feasibility of publishing the narrative documents themselves on a wiki or an extra-institutional document hosting service such as Scribd will be evaluated.
As well as providing raw feeds, we will aggregate the RSS and iCalendar data in the institutional VLE (Moodle) and an institutional wiki for learners and practitioners who prefer institutionally mediated aggregation2.
Learners and practitioners will have an opportunity to respond to the action items through discussion groups and XMPP chat rooms, as well as through syndicating the information into their own extra-institutional social networks.