Higher Education systems around the world have had to reconfigure themselves and tailor their policies towards addressing the new challenges posed by the changing world in which graduates now find themselves.
Entry into the labor market of large numbers of graduates who lack necessary qualifications has not only caused alarm among employers but has given governments responsible for improving the quality of education cause for concern. This has prompted detailed reviews of transparency criteria regarding accountability and efficiency in institutional management.
The concept of quality varies with legislation, but there are generally two common elements involved: the focus on assurance of minimum standards that guarantee the professional competences of graduates from higher education institutions (HEI); and continuous improvement involving the creation of an institutional program which must be continuously audited by external agents. The two elements are clearly complementary.
According to a study of Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Europe and Latin America, this type of mechanism is implemented for three reasons: quality evaluation, quality assurance, and continuous improvement. Adherence to these assumptions should be fail-safe: the end user and the recipient of all of these measurements would be the student. More important, however, is the way these processes result in the formulation of strategies and tools to improve learning.
The term compliance has become increasingly popular around the world to refer to the creation and formalization of protocols concerning adherence to the various quality assurance systems. The concept hails from the world of finance and has been adopted as a result of the rigorous regulation that HEIs require, leading to the creation of compliance plans and the generation of empirical evidence.
Higher Education compliance management requires that each and every member of an institution be responsible for management of resources like time, budget, service and staff, and given the scale of many HEIs, there is an ever growing need for support from platforms that centralize commercial and ethical practices as mechanisms for control of all operations.
Incorporation of a technology solution aimed at accountability not only allows for the organization of all administrative efforts in one place, but means that learning analytics can feed into educational processes, converting the huge amounts of data collected into useful knowledge that can then form the basis of decision-making.
According to the study Technology Outlook: Ibero-American Tertiary Education 2012-2017, learning analytics involve “interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. The goal of gathering, recording, analyzing and presenting this data is to enable teachers to efficiently tailor educational opportunities to each student’s level of need and ability in close-to-real time. Still in its early stages, learning analytics responds to calls for greater monitoring and accountability on campuses as a means of informing strategic decisions. It is also an effective way to harness the vast amount of data produced by students in academic activities” (Durall et al., 2012, p.14).
The Society for Learning Analytics Research defines it as a field of study, describing it as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (Long & Siemens, 2011. p.34).
UNESCO states that, thanks to these systems, information will continue to influence the creation, acquisition and transmission of knowledge, and that it will play an ongoing role in the update of course content and teaching methods and in improving access to Higher Education.
As we mentioned in our Assessment blog with regard to universities, and according to UNESCO, “the new technology of information does not make educators any less indispensable; rather it modifies their role in the learning process, requiring them to constantly transform information into knowledge and understanding” (UNESCO, 1998).
The study Broadening the scope and increasing the usefulness of learning analytics: the case for assessment analytics offers an explanation of why HEIs should incorporate learning analytics into their quality assessment cycle.
Assessment is widely recognized to motivate learning and therefore plays a significant role in student education (Bloxham & Boyd, 2007; Boud & Falchikov, 2007; Dochy, Segers, Gijbels & Struyven, 2007; Scouller, 1998; Snyder, 1973).
The data enables students to measure attainment across time, in comparison to their starting point (ipsative development), to their peers, and/or against benchmarks or standards.
Assessment analytics could usefully inform annual course and module evaluation by providing meaningful inter-cohort, intra- and inter-school comparison and intra- and inter-institutional comparison. By being able to identify areas for targeted intervention at each level of achievement, it has the potential to benefit all students. It may also benefit institutions’ recruitment strategies.
This is simply because, unlike such things as the use of online environments for student interaction, assessment is already ubiquitous across all institutions and its place and role is already widely accepted and understood by all stakeholders.
Student success
There is no single definition of student success. A study of more than 20 institutions conducted by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment in the USA found that success depends on a variety of policies, backgrounds, contributions and approaches, and each of these depend in turn on the cultural systems, mentalities and success criteria of students themselves.
The study proposed a series of criteria upon which to base an initial student framework that would enable the detection of success factors, most importantly:
1. Clear understanding of the student population and their requirements.
2. Regular and ongoing student participation in the design of supports and the interpretation of data.
3. Clarity of institutional processes relating to selection and implementation of approaches tailored to the students and which are both based on and will feed back into research.
4. In the quest for success, assess what works best, for whom and under which circumstances.
With regard to the institution itself, there are a number of critical questions:
1. Is the institution aware of and does it understand its various student groups (including their intentions and objectives), the communities it serves and the communities into which its leavers graduate?
2. Is the institution prepared for its students and is there transparency regarding who it may or may not serve well?
3. Is the institution able to collect, protect and analyze data concerning student success, and can it help its student make sense of the data?
4. Has the institution tailored its processes, practices, culture and success criteria to the students that it really serves?
5. Given the financial restrictions present, what is the institution doing to move away from an isolated approach to assessment of student success and towards approaches that are collectively integrated, purposeful and systematic?
6. Can the institution justify to a range of interested parties its approach to its current students and which documents it uses?
Compliance in Higher Education is becoming an increasingly common objective that benefits an institution in terms of both accreditation and continuous improvement. However, analysis of the information with the help of a tool that is capable of centralizing the data and outputting results relevant to all stakeholders offers an even greater benefit: improved student learning outcomes.