Quality Assurance Life cycle at FCS:
Academic delivery and administration at FCS follows the complete lifecycle of Quality Assurance (QA). The main activities include high-quality academic delivery, feedback from all stakeholders, tracking of key performance indicators, oversight of the academic process by a team of EEs, reporting of AMRs and follow up action plans to ensure upholding of QA standards.
Internal Moderation at FCS
The FCS ensures that assessment material prepared by the General Course Coordinators (GCCs) is of the highest order by performing both Internal and External Moderation of the assessments. The external Moderation is performed by a team of External Examiners. The Internal Moderation is performed at the Deanship by the team of General Programme Coordinators (GPCs) at the Deanship. The module assessments are checked to ensure coverage of the Learning Outcomes and to ensure the overall quality of the assessments.
Current External Examiner Team
The FCS has a team of External Examiners to ensure External Examining of the assessment material and to ensure the overall quality of the academic delivery at FCS. The current team of External Examiners consists of the following examiners:
- Prof. Matt Jones (Swansea University, UK)
- Prof. Ana Vukovic (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Dr Rakan Aldmour (Staffordshire University, UK)
- Dr Diana Hintea (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
- Dr Markus Wolf ( University of Greenwich, UK)
- Dr Antony Brown (University of Bedfordshire, UK)
- Dr Abdulghani Ahmed (De Montfort University, UK)
The External Examiners are members of the CAC and FEC and participate in their exam boards. The FCS also has a Chief External Examiner i.e. Prof. Matt Jones who participates in the CEC as well.
Exam Boards
The FCS follows the Exam Board structure as implemented by the AOU. The AOU follows a tiered approach to exam boards consisting of the following:
- Branch Examination Committee (BEC)
- Course Assessment Committee (CAC)
- Faculty Examination Committee (FEC)
- Central Examination Committee (CEC)
The students' marks and grades are considered by the above exam boards. The External Examiners are members of the CAC and FEC. The Chief External Examiner is also a member of the CEC. The grades are finally approved by the CEC at AOU before their announcement to students.
External Examiner Visits and Reports
The External Examiners Visit the FCS at AOU at the end of the semester
in order to evaluate the quality of marking, grading and overall delivery of
the academic services and procedures at FCS. During the visits, the External
Examiners evaluate the quality of marking through the provisioning of samples
of students' work. The External Examiners participate in the exam boards to
ensure fairness of marking and grading procedures. At the end of their visits,
the External Examiners submit their External Examiner reports with valuable
feedback on the academic delivery. The FCS prepares responses to External
Examiner reports and these are included in AMR.
Annual Monitoring Report (AMR)
At the end of the Academic Year, the FCS prepares and submits an Annual Monitoring Report (AMR) to the OU, UK. The AMR is a very detailed document that captures and presents all major aspects of programme delivery, at FCS. Some of the salient aspects include providing detailed statistical data about students' registration and progression, providing data about students and tutors views and their analysis, providing all External Examiner reports and the Action Plans based on these reports.
Key performance indicators
The AOU has adopted the concept of 'Unified University' in which all of its 9 country campuses use the same academic delivery practices and assessment procedures under the central academic leadership of its Headquarters in Kuwait. The 'Unified University' concept requires the AOU to uphold the same Quality Assurance (QA) standards at all of its branches. The AOU follows a Blended Model of education delivery, which consists of both face-to-face components as well as independent learning on part of students, considering the vast amount of educational and online supplementary material provided to them via AOU Learning Management System (LMS). In order to manage such a large number of students and deal with the associated academic/administrative challenges, the AOU makes extensive use of a wide range of Cloud-based applications to manage the students' life cycle. Hence, the need to adopt Big Data Analytics (BDA) was realized as it is ideally suited to analyze the Big Data scenarios associated with the aforementioned applications as well as the central operational activities. This implies adopting BDA to enable AOU to track the students' Key Academic Performance Indicators (KPIs), employing not only the Exploration and Business Intelligence capabilities, but also Predictive Analytics in addition to the Dashboard Presentations.
The aims of analyzing the KPIs are:
- To track the students KPIs across the AOU country campuses, employing the Exploration and Business Intelligence capabilities.
- To improve the overall student experience at AOU.
- To be able to measure the efficiency of the different AOU country campuses in administering an academic Programme.
- To improve student retention and progression using predictive analytics facilities by identifying the factors that play a dominant role in retaining students at AOU.
- To be able to identify “At-Risk-Students" in a timely manner by introducing the Student Risk Factor Analytics Dashboard.
- To provide all the relevant data/information in the form of dashboards to the decision-makers on demand.
Selection of KPIs
The Key Academic Performance Indicators that we have considered are related to both the Students' Academic Performance as well as to the Performance of the Academic Programme Delivery. The latter is related mainly to the factors affecting the administration of the academic program. The KPIs have been selected to enable us to achieve our research aims. The KPIs considered in this work include the following:
Module Offerings across AOU
This KAPI is directly related to the delivery of the academic programme, and it measures the variety of the programme modules available to the students for study across AOU country campuses, indicating the level of each module and whether it belongs to AOU or OU-UK in addition to being externally examined or not. Module Offerings is an indicator of the breadth and depth of the academic programme, and any increase or decrease in the number of offered modules indicates growth or decline of the academic program activities. This KPI will help in ascertaining the growth of the ITC Programme in various AOU country campuses. Since all offered modules are available to all 9 country campuses of AOU, the number of offered modules at any particular country campus directly influence the efficiency regarding resource utilization at that country campus.
Net Registered Students
This KAPI is related to the demand of the students on the academic programme in addition to the administration and marketing of such a programme. It measures the net number of students registered in each module of the academic programme per AOU country campus in addition to the breakdown of such number according to the gender of the registered students. Therefore, it gives a detailed figure about the health of the program. This KPI determines the viability of the academic programme at any of AOU country campuses. An increase in the number of registered students at a particular country campus indicates growth at that campus and the popularity of such an academic programme.
Module Pass Rate
This KAPI measures the pass rate per module per AOU country campus in addition to the breakdown according to the gender of the students. This KPI is related to a number of factors, including Students Academic Achievement, Academic Delivery, Level and/or Difficulty of the module, Students Background and/or Experience etc. A high, or low, value for this KPI should be subjected to the scrutiny of whether the assessments were of the appropriate level of difficulty or not and whether the marking was of the appropriate standards or not. Usually, high pass rates are considered healthy, as they contribute towards higher student progression and retention whereas low pass rates usually indicate an unhealthy academic situation. This KPI is directly related to the progress of students in their studies.
Dropout Rates
This KAPI measures dropout rates after initial registration/enrolment, per each module per AOU country campus in addition to the breakdown according to the gender of the students. This KPI is related to the Open Education Environment, Academic Delivery of the module, as well as Level and/or Difficulty of the module. Students can withdraw from a module based on their own performance in the module or they may withdraw due to the bad teaching performance of the tutors. Also, students might withdraw due to the unsuitability of the academic calendar or problems related to the Open Education Environment as a whole. A high value for this KAPI highlights an unhealthy academic situation, and it is always desirable to have a low value for this KPI. This KPI is directly used to measure or indicate student retention.
%Students Attending Final Exam
This KPI measures the %Students Attending the Final Exam, as a ratio of the net registered students, per each module per AOU country campus in addition to the breakdown according to the gender of the students. This metric is related to both the Academic Delivery as well as the Student Performance factors. It partly measures the preparedness and seriousness on part of the students to face the challenges corresponding to the module study to be ready for the final exam, and it also indicates the results of the teaching staff's effort to motivate and make students confident/ready to face the final exam. Low values for this KPI highlights an unhealthy situation. This KPI is aimed at gauging student engagement with the academic program.
Country Campus Efficiency
This KPI is applicable to distributed or multi-campus institutions. Since AOU is operating in 8 country campuses hence we have considered this KPI. It is hypothetically estimated from a number of factors such as Students' Pass Rate in the programme offered modules, %Students Attended Final Exam, %Withdrawn Students, Fulltime Staff to Students Ratio, Class Utilization, etc. as we will discuss below in subsequent sections. This KPI determines the optimum utilization of resources by AOU country campuses.
