Guarantee quality and sustainability

The following questions will help you focus on which aspects are important to take into consideration when evaluating and monitoring your course and guarantee its quality.

WHY EVALUATING?

When facing the redesign of your course to include soft skill development, you will be interested in summing up the results of this experience and evaluating the effectiveness of the new teaching approach adopted in terms of ILOs’ achievement, perceived quality of the educational experience, both from the teachers’ and the students’ perspective and the sustainability of the course itself.

The monitoring and evaluation processes are important for:

• understanding what worked and what didn’t in relation to the organizational, educational, communicative and technological areas;
• collecting information to formalize and refine the model if it is to be used in subsequent years;
• evaluating the effort required by the teacher or the team of teachers and to focus on what can be reiterated and identifying which the aspects they have been more at ease with during the experimentation;
• evaluating the effort required by students to understand if it is possible to propose the same activities again or, on the contrary, if it is better to remodel the entire course.

WHEN EVALUATING?

While rethinking your course you should also define what data you are interested in collecting, through which tools, and how often. This process has to occur throughout the whole course, every time the active learning methodology takes place to foster soft skills. In this way, you will have the necessary information required to improve the next implementation of the method, if needed.

HOW EVALUATING?

Throughout the duration of the course both qualitative and quantitative data can be collected and analyzed. In particular:
All this data will support a teacher’s reflection in identifying what worked well. The data helps to highlight what was critical and what should require a redesign or a simple refocus in the activity or assessment task and what was missing in order to guarantee quality and the sustainability of the experience.

WHAT TO CARE ABOUT

Below there is a list of common criticisms that emerged while monitoring the course.

CHALLENGE	POSSIBLE SOLUTION
Learners have difficulties in perceiving the level of integration of the active learning method in the course	Review the consistency among defined ILO(s) and the assessment task
Learners may feel overwhelmed by the effort required	Consider a reconfiguration of the activities proposed or spacing out of the lectures over a longer time period (verify if this is related to the period over which the lectures take place as they may overlap with other lessons)
Adding activities that aim at improving students’ soft skills can make it difficult to cover all the topics usually presented in a lecture or module	You are the designer of the learning experience. When you define ILOs, you also make a selection of the topics that are going to be covered during the course Theoretical content can be proposed out of class, as reading material or video lesson and recall in class to verify the understanding. Time in class can be then dedicated to activities oriented towards soft skills development
Active learning works differently from what a student might expect out of a university class. This aspect can result in a final evaluation of the course and/or low participation and engagement	A prompt, from the start of the course (and in the syllabus) and clear communication about expectations and the rationale for using active learning, is necessary
Some students may be reluctant or unwilling to interact with their peers	Make transparent what is expected in terms of interaction and participation and what would happen if students do not engage with their peers. The more details available the better Proposing different typologies of interactions (online in a forum, in teamwork, in peer assessment activities) can support the participation of the whole class
Learners may have difficulties in conducting and finalizing tasks and working towards the learning outcomes you envision because of inadequate soft skill levels	When an activity is proposed for the first time, it may be useful to organize a short training input where a presentation of examples of good performances, in order to let learners understand how the activity should run You must be present, guiding the activity and intervening when needed For a complex or long activity (for example peer assessment, project work, problem-based learning) it is better to break the activity into smaller ‘chunks’

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REFERENCE

For additional references and supporting research please visit Bibliography page.