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Quality Evaluation of the Higher Education
Programmes
David Bañeres, Laura Porta, Teresa Romeu, Montse Serra
IT, Multimedia and Telecomunications Department
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
The universities in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) must fulfil several
directives in order to be able to provide a high education degree. A degree is evaluated
in all its life cycle: from its design, when it is approved, during its monitoring, until its
verification. Thus, each country has a quality agency that articulates all these processes
of evaluation following the policies recommended by the European Association for
Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) in order to guarantee the quality
required for a specific degree [1].
Related to the monitoring process of a degree, an annual report evaluating several
indicators has to be delivered to the agency. More precisely, the report describes
information like statistics about the enrolment, the student performance, the satisfaction
results, or the type of learning resources. Moreover, there is also a summary of the year
composed of: detected issues, a set of enhancement proposals and planned corrective
measures. Subsequently, this report is analyzed by the agency and a report's feedback is
returned to the university together with the issues that should be corrected and improved
during the next year.
Based on this annual report, the monitoring process consists of the steps described
below:
 The degree's coordinator analyzes the remarks performed by the agency in the
previous report in order to make the suitable adjustments within the degree.
 The issues related to a subject that should be corrected are delivered to the
teacher in charge of the subject. The issues are shared within teaching staff of
the same knowledge area in order to find solutions and implement the
corresponding corrections and improvements.
 The teachers collect evidences throughout the course in order to point out the
weakness and the strength of it for the next annual report.
 At the end of the course, the evidences and the analysis of the course are
delivered to the coordinator's degree and teaching staff of the same knowledge
area.
 The degree's coordinator collects all the evidences and, simultaneously, he
analyzes and synthesizes the results of the evaluation in her annual report in a
continuous process of improvement.
As we can observe in the previous description, the monitoring process involves the
degree's coordinator and all the teaching staff of the degree. This fact tends to be time-
consuming since all the teachers should collaboratively work to meet the quality
standards. Currently, in our university this collaborative work is manually performed,
that is, the information is transferred by arranging a meeting between the coordinator
and the teachers. Additionally, the information concluded from this meeting is delivered

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to the coordinator with unformatted documents increasing the analyzing time. This
methodology is not efficient and is even more impractical within a degree with a large
teaching staff.
The present proposal focuses on the evaluation of the quality of a concrete degree by
using techniques commonly used on e-assessment [2], since some of these techniques of
assessment used to evaluate the students can be extrapolated to other areas. Specifically,
we propose to use rubric-based assessment to evaluate the quality of a degree.
The rubric helps to self-evaluate a specific subject by measuring some indicators.
Indicators with regard to the learning resources, tools, evaluation, satisfaction, quality of
the teaching plan, and even the performance of the teaching staff are evaluated. Notice
that, this rubric approach guarantees the same criteria for each subject. The gradation of
the quality ranges from deficient, acceptable to excellent. Moreover, each indicator also
accepts information in natural language describing issues and enhancements tasks
scheduled for the next semester.
In order to improve the efficiency of the evaluation process, the technique has been
implemented within a tool called AVALA. The tool collects all the evidences related to
the operative of a concrete degree in the course of a semester. Furthermore, it has been
designed as a collaborative framework where all the teaching staff and the coordinator
can share all the information related to quality assurance.
The tool has a twofold objective. In one hand, as we described, it helps a teacher to
collect and analyze all the evidences related to the performance of the teaching process
during a semester. At the same time, the teacher can analyze the progress of these
evidences from the current semester in comparison with the previous ones. On the other
hand, the coordinator degree can consult all the collected evidences on a single
environment, it means, the coordinator has a view of the underlying information of the
current semester and at a glance she knows what issues need to be addressed.
Additionally, the tool has other features to help in some steps of the monitoring process:
 The comments of the quality agency are stored by subjects. This feature helps
the instructors to automatically know the issues that should be corrected during
the current semester.
 The system synthesizes the subjects’ evaluations for delivering automatically
reports about the critical issues of the degree. This information will help the
coordinator to perform the annual reports.
The AVALA tool has been used in the IT, Telecommunication and Multimedia
department of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya during the courses 2012-13 and
2013-14 (divided in two semesters both courses). Three degrees and six masters have
been managed using the tool and around sixty professors have been involved in the
process of evaluation.
The experimental results have been satisfactory. The coordinators agree that the tool is
useful to review and centralize the information previously cited. Besides, the critical
problems can be easily detected. The system misses a control panel with alerts such as
subjects with low performance or satisfaction. Indeed, professors agree on the
improvement of the efficiency related to the transfer of the information and the

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structured way to store the data. However, they complain about the time invested in the
evaluation of all the subjects.
The tool has some deficiencies that should be corrected in the immediate future. Some
users' demands will be taken into account in order to improve the framework.
Nevertheless, the main goals of the tool have been achieved reducing the time invested
in the guidance's quality of the degree.
As a final conclusion, AVALA tool provides an added value, not only with regard to the
efficiency of the teacher’s work, but also when establishing a better way to manage all
the monitoring processes that belong to a degree contributing the quality’s guarantee.
REFERENCES
[1] Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education
Area. http://www.enqa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ESG_3edition-2.pdf. Last
accessed: 21/10/2014
[2] Crisp, G. T. (2012). Integrative assessment: reframing assessment practice for
current and future learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(1), 33-
43.