Quality Assurance
This page contains information about quality assurance frameworks that may help you to design and evaluate your courses.
Strategies for assuring the quality of your courses are a necessity. They will provide you with objective evidence of what is working well and what needs to be improved. Also, in England, is a requirement that providers of initial teacher training courses monitor and evaluate the quality of their provision. See ITT requirements guidance R2.2 and R3.6. ITT provision in England is inspected by Ofsted in accordance with the latest published inspection framework, which is currently Framework for the inspection of initial teacher education 2008-2011. It is always a good idea to find out what inspectors will be looking for and check how your courses fare against their criteria.
In addition to the TDA and Ofsted, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) provides a range of guidance related to academic standards and quality. It includes sections on programme specifications, subject benchmark standards (for generic Computing and Education courses) and a framework for higher education qualifications.
Your institution may have a generic quality assurance framework that you will need to adopt.
As well as helping you to evaluate your existing course(s), these frameworks may help if you are designing a new course by identifying components, criteria and quality assurance checks to include in it.
As you will undoubtedly be making use of e-learning and e-teaching in your courses, you may find that none of the QA frameworks enable you to take sufficient account of either of these approaches. You may find the following resources helpful as a source for ideas to incorporate into your own quality assurance procedures:
A benchmarking tool for quality assessment in e-learning has been developed by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU).
E-xcellence. It is intended as a supplement to, not a replacement for, existing institutional or national quality assurance frameworks. An important aspect of this resource is that "it offers a European-wide set of benchmarks, independent of particular institutional or national systems".
ICT Mark for Schools and Naacemark for Service Providers provide useful criteria and offer accreditation for organisations that meet them.
Further reading
Although these articles relate to professional development for in-service teachers, the criteria discussed for judging the effectiveness of programmes have some validity in initial teacher education.
Davis, N., Preston, C., & Sahin, I., (2007) ICT teacher training: Evidence for multilevel evaluation from a national initiative, British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 40, Issue 1, pages 135-148, published online 2008.
Guskey, T. R. (2002). Does it make a difference? Evaluating professional development. Educational Leadership, 59, 6, 45–51.
If you have used other frameworks or resources that you found useful and you are willing and able to share them, please let us know, using the email link below.
author: Margaret Danby