On January 27, 2021, Quality Assurance & Institutional Effectiveness team organized the Quality Framework Forum as part of GMU’s continuous pursuit of quality enhancement across all colleges and programs. The Forum was attended both onsite and online by 57 members from across different Colleges.
The Forum was led by Prof. Sherief Khalifa, Vice Chancellor Quality & Global Engagement and Dean, College of Pharmacy. The objective of the Forum was to overview all the important updates and areas to be improved in the university operations in relation to the 4 key domains including quality assurance, students, faculty and the assessment.
The session related to students discussed establishment of student happiness center in each college and the new online system for management of student grievances and appeals, appointment of student representatives as members of the college councils across all colleges, conducting orientation sessions for the graduate exit survey to students before the survey release, evaluation of extra-curricular or co-curricular activities through student feedback to assess the effectiveness and impact of the activities and sharing the action plans for improvement with the students to create a true feeling of partnership between faculty and students and to reinforce the culture of transparency.
One of the main highlights of the forum was to encourage all colleges of GMU to demonstrate consistency in assessment practices. Colleges need to look into ensuring full alignment of PLOs with the tasks and assignments present in the student e-portfolios, assigning mentors the responsibility to follow student e-portfolios, reducing the turnaround time for feedback to students on assessments, implementing midsemester course evaluation to initiate immediate improvements within the on-going semester, ensuring full alignment of CLOs with the assessments, encouraging extensive use of formative assessment and timely feedback to students on the same and the annual submission of End of Semester Assessment Report by the assessment committee to reflect on the actions taken for improvement and impact of change implementation.
Human Resources is crucial to the enhancement of overall academic and research quality at GMU> The forum emphasized the need for each college to strengthen the role of its College recruitment committee comprising of the college leadership and a subject matter expert when needed. Also, the Forum requested the colleges to quickly adopt the new policy on peer assessment of teaching & learning as a tool for triangulation along with student feedback.
The Vice Chancellor Quality & Global Engagement highlighted that the policies have been revised to ensure alignment with the recommendations of national and international accreditation bodies. It is now the responsibility of the entire GMU community to ensure that the current practices are in full compliance with the policies. Also, colleges were requested to measure their performance and achievements against their strategic plan and ensure submission of an operational report as part of the College annual reoprt. The VCQ&GE stated that the QA&PE committee is responsible for reviewing Course files at the college level. Finally, the Forum provided an overview of the course file submission process and addressed queries from the audience.
Link to Forum Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KdykzoyL6oB3TQcQ2aACueLv03N-asA1/view?usp=sharing