Raising Quality Teaching in Higher Education

Quality teaching is the use of pedagogical techniques to produce learning outcomes for students. It involves several dimensions, including the effective design of curriculum and course content, a variety of learning contexts (including guided independent study, project-based learning, collaborative learning, experimentation, etc.), soliciting and using feedback, and effective assessment of learning outcomes. It also involves well-adapted learning environments and student support services. Experience showed that fostering quality teaching is a multi-level endeavor. Support for quality teaching takes place at three inter-dependent levels: 

• At the institution-wide level: including projects such as policy design, and support to organization and internal quality assurance systems.
• Programmed level: comprising actions to measure and enhance the design, content and delivery of the programmes within a department or a school.
• Individual level: including initiatives that help teachers achieve their mission, encouraging them to innovate and to support improvements to student learning and adopt a learner oriented focus. 

These three levels are essential and inter-dependent. However, supporting quality teaching at the programme level is key so as to ensure improvement in quality teaching at the discipline level and across the institution. Support for quality teaching can be manifested through a wide range of activities that are likely to improve the quality of the teaching process, of the programme content, as well as the learning conditions of students. Hybrid forms often prevail in institutions. These can include initiatives such as:

•  A center for teaching and learning development
•  Professional development activities (e.g. in-service training for faculty) 
•  Teaching excellence awards and competitions for remarkable improvements 
•  Teaching innovation funds 
•  Teaching recruitment criteria 
•  Support to innovative pedagogy 
•  Communities of teaching and learning practices 
•  Learning environments (libraries, computing facilities…) 
•  Organization and management of teaching and learning 
•  Support to foster student achievement (e.g. counselling, career advice, mentoring…) 
•  Students’ evaluation (i.e. programme ratings, evaluating learning experiences)
•  Self-evaluation of experimentations, peer-reviewing, benchmarking of practices 
•  Community service and work-based programmes, development-based programmes 
•  Competence-based assessments

New paradigms for Quality Teaching

The fundamental changes in employment over the past 50 years imply a rise in the demand for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills and a decline in the demand for routine cognitive and craft skills, physical labour and repetitive physical tasks (OECD, 2012). Graduates are entering a world of employment that is characterised by greater uncertainty, speed, risk, complexity and interdisciplinary working.

University education, and the mode of learning whilst at university, will need to prepare students for entry to such an environment and equip them with appropriate skills, knowledge, values and attributes to thrive in it. There is a strong drive to build and create knowledge together with an understanding of working life and reformulate the concept of knowledge in learning situations. Tighter connections with working life through different academic projects provide authentic opportunities to learn both generic and professional competencies as well as to build networks and pathways for employment after graduation.

Universities across the globe are increasingly pressed to find ways of proving their worth not only in the preparation of students, but also how they are linked to business and industry. Learning rooted in working life could help institutions to interpret and respond pedagogically to the challenges of this environment, using other forms of teaching and learning patterns, like project-based learning.

Higher education can no longer be owned by a community of disciplinary connoisseurs who transmit knowledge to students. Both the complexity and uncertainty of society and the economy will require institutions to continuously adapt while upholding quality standards. In practice, institutions will have to learn how to best serve the student community. Students have become the focal point of the learning approach in many areas of the world.
At the same time, students appear to have become more sensitive to equality of treatment and demand to be provided with equal teaching and learning opportunities, to be assessed fairly and get the education they deserve for job and social inclusion. The expansion of higher education providers along with the diversification of student types put the issue of equity at the very center of quality issues.

With this view of learning, the role of higher education teachers is therefore changing. In addition to being, first and foremost, a subject expert acquainted with ways to transmit knowledge, higher education teachers are now required to have effective pedagogical skills for delivering student learning outcomes. They also need to co-operate with students, colleagues from other departments, and with external stakeholders as members of a dynamic learning community.

Key elements to consider in fostering quality teaching

• The ultimate goal of quality teaching policies is to improve the quality of the learning experiences of students and – through this – the outcomes of learning. Policies and practices to foster quality teaching should therefore be guided by this ultimate goal.
• Teaching and learning are inherently intertwined and this necessitates a holistic approach to any development initiative. 
• Sustained quality teaching policies require long-term, non-linear efforts and thus call for a permanent institutional commitment from the top-leadership of the institution.
• Definitions and conceptions of quality teaching are varied across contexts and evolve over time.
• They require adaptability and an empirical basis to remain useful for development. Instilling a culture of change will be key in ensuring relevance and sustainability.
• Quality teaching initiatives respond to specific objectives of an institution and could therefore be irrelevant when implemented in another institution, or in another department or school within the same institution. Ensuring the alignment of differing approaches in regard to teaching and learning and their contribution to the institutional strategy are key.
• Quality teaching policies should be designed consistently at institutional, programme and individual levels. The programme levels are the pivotal place where quality teaching is likely to flourish.
• Encouraging a quality teaching culture will consist in inter-linking the various types and levels of support so that collaboration and its likely impacts on the teaching and learning are enhanced among leaders, teachers, students, staff and other stakeholders.
• Strengthening horizontal linkages and creating synergies is a particularly effective way of supporting the development of quality teaching.
• Learning experiences can be gained in many different forms of learning environments, not to be limited to auditoriums and class-rooms. Learning happens also outside the institution and also from a distance.
• The temporal dimension counts in quality teaching: what can be done at a certain point of time cannot be done later and vice-versa. There are “opportunity windows” to catch.
• The environment, students’ profiles and demands, job markets requirements, reputation and history of the institution are the prominent factors amongst others that influence a strategy of teaching improvement.
• There are no predetermined thresholds to be attained in quality teaching. The lack of quantitative indicators should not be a barrier to assess the impacts. Interpreting results of the impact of quality teaching initiatives is key.
• Orchestrating the implementation, setting the right pace of change, leaving room for experiments enable a steady improvement in the quality of teaching.
• Few quantitative standards can be prescribed and measured. Each institution is primarily responsible for the quality of its teaching and should set the bar internally. Comparative analysis within and across institutions is however likely to provide new benchmarks, as long as the method used is reliable and transparent.
• Quality teaching is a part of a global quality approach and of the institutional strategy and should not be isolated from the institutional quality culture.
• Incentives are more impactful than regulations and coercive stands. Ministerial authorities, funding bodies and quality assurance agencies should contribute to foster a climate for change. Robust and trustful partnership between actors is key.

Challenges

Quality teaching matters but not all actors in higher education consider it a priority, understand and recognize what constitutes quality teaching, or are willing and able to play a role in ensuring it takes place in their institutions. Institutions play the key role in fostering quality teaching: national regulations rarely require or prompt academics to be trained in pedagogy or to upgrade their educational competences over their professional life span.
Emphasis on research performance – for both institutions and individual academics – has traditionally overshadowed teaching and learning for students in many countries. Some institutional decision making bodies might consider it almost incidental to the mission of higher education or may not have realised that their institutional policies send that message to their faculty.

Academics themselves understandably place a very high value on research and are often acutely aware of the “publish or perish” challenge that plays a large role in determining a successful career path: they may worry that time spent on teaching would undermine their capacity to compete effectively in their research field.

Yet many institutions, including major research universities, are challenged by the increasing diversity of students that has resulted from the increasing share of young people enrolling in higher education along with more mature students as well. At the same time, institutions are coming under greater public pressure to demonstrate that they are preparing their graduates for the labour market and to show what value students will get in return for the cost of their education – whether paid for by the student or the taxpayer.

Many institutional leaders are reconsidering how to manage the balance in fulfilling their teaching and research missions and how to raise the quality of teaching and learning they deliver. Yet top-down initiatives may encounter resistance from faculty that perceive it as an encroachment of academic freedom and care is needed to find the right balance between institutional leadership and managerial intrusion.

Despite some resistance, much improvement has been achieved. Faculty have increasingly sought to strengthen the relevance of their programmes to societal and economic needs, and have become more willing to re-visit their role to strengthen the students’ learning and their future employability. Many explore alternative pedagogies or adapt student-support to varied student profiles.

Looking across countries, there is a common trend towards institutions adopting more strategic approaches to their development. Many institutions have established explicit strategic objectives (sometimes prompted by contractual agreements with funding agencies) – that focus their mission, streamline their activities and guide their operational planning. These strategic objectives can also be used to signal an institutional commitment to fostering quality teaching and provide an anchor for developing a coherent set of initiatives – at institution, department, school or programme level – and monitoring progress towards better results.

Prioritize quality teaching as a strategic objective

• Set quality teaching as a strategic objective for the institution to signal the institution’s commitment to fostering continuous improvement in teaching.

Establish a teaching and learning framework

• Develop an institution-wide framework for teaching and learning that reflects the mission, values and specialties of the institution and defines the objectives of teaching and the expected learning outcomes for students.
• Ensure that all specific teaching and learning frameworks at department, school or programme level are consistent with the institution-wide framework.
• Engage the whole community (full time faculty and part-timers, researchers and teaching-only faculty), and include student’s viewpoints in the development of these frameworks, to ensure a broadly shared understanding of quality.
• Align the teaching and learning process as well as student assessment to the teaching and learning framework.

Promote quality teaching within and outside the institution

• Explore every opportunity to foster discussions on quality teaching, for instance as part of programme (re-)accreditation, institutional audits, publication of international rankings, appointment of new university leaders, implementation of national reforms.
• Use various avenues and contexts (e.g., mission statement, institutional policies such as promotion and salary augmentation, support for institutional and national teaching awards, etc.) to convey to the academic community explicitly that teaching is important and valued.
• Advocate quality teaching nationally or regionally, and invite decision-makers to place support for teaching and learning high on their political agenda.
• Engage in national, regional and international networks to share best practices in quality teaching and hold national or regional events (conferences) giving exposure to institutional achievements on quality teaching.

Strengthen links between teaching and research

• Explore how the research activities of the institution affect the policies supporting teaching and learning (e.g., in terms of learning environment, curriculum design, student’s assessment).
• Provide support for faculty involved in fostering quality teaching so that their engagement does not undermine their careers as researchers.
• Build research capacity through the promotion of research-teaching linkages, such as: 
• Demonstration of how research informs teaching
• Engagement in research-inspired teaching
• Development of undergraduate students’ research-skills
• Engage undergraduate students in carrying out research as part of the teaching and learning strategy and encourage and support undergraduate students to publish their research.