student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Part A: Developing a Distributed Leadership Model - Secton 4: Outcomes and Critical Sucess Factors4.1.2 Reflection on the OutcomesPositive examples of improved student feedback were recorded by the ARTsin response to changes they implemented to learning and teaching practice.These improvements are reported at length in the ART Reports in part Bof this Report. They include:––Favourable student attitude towards the use of classroom technology.––Improvement in the GTS.––Positive student feedback to the additional formative assessmenttasks, feedback on their progress and to course support changes.In addition a number of positive outcomes for the ongoing improvementof student feedback were identified in interviews and Focus Group meetingswith various participants in the project.I. Service Providers stated that the project provided them with theopportunity to open communication channels between academic teachingstaff and service providers. An interesting comment was made that formalleaders (such as Heads of School) in traditional meetings tend to filterout things they have heard at the local level and present this in a morestrategic way. This has both positive and negative outcomes as oftenservice providers do not hear the real problems as perceived byacademics.As a result of this more open communication service providers heardabout some of the problems with venues used for teaching purposesof which they had previously been unaware. For example the projectprovided the opportunity for service providers to attend classes andexperience the challenges of teaching in different venues. One examplecited was the concern of academic teaching staff about having to vacateone of the theatres used for teaching for five weeks during the ComedyFestival. Once the problem was identified the relevant department(Property and Services) informed the Comedy Festival organisers that theycould no longer have the theatre. A comment made that illustrated thisas a positive outcome was:there are so many things as you drift around RMIT that arean annual thing that just happen, no-one’s really responsibleor understands the history of them, and they’re not reviewed…it’s only a sort of ad hoc or an unusual experience like thisthat you get to hear about them….Page 69