student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Student Feedback & Leadership
In addition, the PVC (Student Services) area undertakes periodic surveys
of students on institution-wide issues and does establish programs in response
to student feedback, but there is no formal linkage between these surveys
and the CES.
RMIT University has performed well on some student outcomes indicators for
the Learning and Teaching Performance fund such as graduate employment.
However, it has not performed well on student outcomes indicators for good
teaching, generic skills and overall satisfaction, based on the CEQ.Performance
on these scales has improved marginally within RMIT but has not improved
in past years in relation to other universities (DEST 2000-2007)
This intersection of the need for the university to improve student feedback
and to provide greater clarity on the leadership and responsibility of staff
involved across the university set the purpose for this project.
1.3 Context
The Project proposal identified that giving and receiving student feedback
is an essential element of the learning and teaching process. DEST has
recognised the importance of student feedback for the quality of learning
through investment in strategies to collect and analyse student feedback
data in the course experience, postgraduate research and student satisfaction
in Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ). According to Stevens (2005 p87)
‘managing student feedback and managing the actions taken in response
to this feedback are the most important areas for assuring quality in learning
and teaching’. This currently is badly managed at RMIT.
The effective use of student feedback is uneven. There is a lack of documented
evidence demonstrating how the challenges of using feedback are being
met in different organisational units in universities and there is little evidence
that current ways of using student feedback are making any contribution
to improving the overall quality of learning and teaching (Kember, Leung
and Kwan, 2002).
Given that the challenges and opportunities identified above for more effective
use of student feedback are not unique to RMIT University, the outcomes
of the project are considered to be of value to other educational institutions.
A sustainable approach to building leadership and the effective use of student
feedback that may be scaled up or adapted to different contexts is of national
significance and can contribute to improvements in the quality of learning and
teaching. Other universities will be interested in improving good teaching
indices to enhance their teaching performance. An example of this interest
is the substantial work that has been done by a consortium of universities
to code and use qualitative comments from CEQ, (DEST Evaluation and
Investigation Project, 2005). Advancement in these areas of practice will
result in improvement in the quality of teaching practice, the quality
of programs and student learning outcomes and experiences.
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