A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Panayiotis Ketikidis et al.
� The Student/Staff Committee which oversees the delivery process of the MSc in BMT
programme. The committee comprises of the academic director of the programme and
representative academic and administration staff members together with student representatives.
The main purposes of the committee which meets twice per semester are to monitor the
programme, find solutions to any problems and most of all enable student input in further
developing the programme.
� The Examination Boards which are responsible for setting and validating assessment methods
and marking. All staff members of both the CSD and BAED participate together the external
examiner.
� The Industrial Advisory Board which aims to facilitate communication and collaboration with the
industry in the Balkan area in order to evaluate the changing needs of the industry, propose
action plans to meet the new challenges and support the achievement of the goals of the MSc
programme.
Finally, external quality assurance mechanisms are also applied, the most important being the
external examiner who ensures that programmes awarded in similar subjects are comparable in
standard to all Universities in the UK, and that the assessment system is fair and operated equitably
in the classification of students.
5. Students' perceptions and feedback
Student evaluations are a critical part of the college’s quality assurance mechanisms. At the end of
each taught unit of the MSc in BMT, we ask students to anonymously complete a questionnaire in
order to gather evidence on teaching effectiveness but also to send a clear message that their
perception of the education provision does indeed matter and affects the quality of teaching. Unit
leaders utilise the feedback provided in order to refine the unit and teaching methods and to enhance
the students’ learning experience.
The questionnaire uses the Likert scale with seven ordered response levels (one being the lowest and
seven the highest). Students are asked to reflect on their educational experience by evaluating the
unit leader, as well as, the guest speakers on four main teaching and learning aspects: a) depth,
breadth, interdisciplinary and transfer of knowledge in the specific area, b) presentation style and
delivery methods, c) ability to motivate and keep students engaged and d) relevance and usefulness
of the presented material. Finally, students provide a rating for their overall satisfaction of the unit.
Table 3 below presents the results of student evaluations for two cohorts (academic years of 2010
and 2011) for both Sofia and Tirana sites which comprised of a total of 20 and 28 students
respectively. The table includes evaluations for each one of the taught units (encoded U1 to U10 in
table 1), as well as, an overall average (AVG). The results are highly encouraging and reflect the high
levels of student satisfaction and the exceptional quality of education provision of the MSc in BMT
programme.
Table 3: Student evaluation results of the MSc in BMT from Sofia and Tirana
UNIT CODE U1 U2 U3 U4 U5 U6 U7 U8 U9 U10 AVG
UNIT LEADER AVG 6.61 6.84 6.7 6.63 6.38 6.19 6.65 6.35 6.8 6.6 6.58
• Knowledge 6.71 6.84 6.79 6.70 6.39 6.19 6.75 6.51 6.85 6.72 6.65
• Presentation/Delivery 6.73 6.90 6.72 6.63 6.45 6.29 6.65 6.6 6.70 6.70 6.64
• Motivation/Interest 6.61 6.84 6.78 6.70 6.38 6.17 6.65 6.30 6.85 6.54 6.58
• Relevance/Usefulness 6.38 6.74 6.54 6.45 6.36 6.02 6.56 6.15 6.71 6.54 6.45
GUEST SPEAKERS AVG 6.59 6.20 5.90 6.02 6.54 5.69 6.37 6.46 6.80 6.08 6.27
• Knowledge 6.72 5.95 5.88 6.13 6.62 5.76 6.42 6.56 6.89 6.36 6.33
• Presentation/Delivery 6.68 6.43 5.75 6.07 6.60 5.73 6.13 6.56 6.95 6.01 6.29
• Motivation/Interest 6.55 6.10 5.83 5.68 6.68 5.45 6.37 6.41 6.70 5.75 6.15
• Relevance/Usefulness 6.40 6.35 6.11 6.24 6.36 5.76 6.51 6.29 6.56 6.22 6.28
OVERALL SATISFACTION 6.59 6.74 6.54 6.45 6.32 5.87 6.56 6.30 6.90 6.16 6.44
In addition to the scaled questions, the questionnaire also contains a number of open ended
questions through which students can freely respond about how they feel and provide more detailed
feedback in terms of overall strengths and weaknesses. These open ended questions cover a wide
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