On 27th of January, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research launched a new White Paper on quality in higher education. The document is titled “Culture for quality in higher education” [own translation] and has main focus on quality of education.
Among the proposals are the option for institutions to set own intake criteria, instruments related to increasing the status of education by creating mechanisms for awarding merit for excellence in education, higher requirements of pedagogical competence when applying for professor positions, a new portal for quality, and peer review of education to name a few.
Project participants met for a two day meeting in Oslo on January 4-5. During two intensive days of working with the empirical data and analytical lenses, the project team also made plans for the final year of the project that is now set to end in 2017.
In the following presentation, Peter Maassen provides a presentation: “Quality Management of Norwegian Higher Education: complexities and visions on possible future developments“. Before the presentation, professor Monika Nerland introduces the overall seminar.
Today, a project meeting is taking place in Oslo, with all the Norwegian partners gathered at NIFU to discuss project progress, plans ahead, and in particular upcoming work in subproject D.
NIFU researcher Pr Olaf Aamodt has re-analyzed some of the data collected in the CAP study, with specific focus on conditions for teaching. Data collection for the CAP (the Changing Academic Profession) project was done in 2007-2008, thus Aamodt cautions that it is possible that there have also been changes in the last 8 years. At the same time, the data can provide valuable inputs to current debates on educational quality.
A key conclusion from the empirical data is that Norwegian professors in average work about 50 hours a week, with about equal share of time on education and research. While these patterns are rather similar to other countries, the data also shows disciplinary differences. The data also shows that there is also great variety in how many students academic staff teaches. Staff report high levels of satisfaction with technical and administrative facilities, but there is general dissatisfaction with lack of basic administrative support (i.e. assistants/secretary).
Educational practices are largely evaluated by students, in a sense rather natural as student feedback on teaching is mandatory. However, there is little evidence of peer feedback on teaching, and Aamodt questions whether such feedback could also contribute to increased quality in educational practices?
