Petra Pistor
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Making a QMS fit – Current developments at University of Duisburg-Essen
The University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) was founded in 2005 via a merger of the preceding institutions, the Universities of Duisburg and Essen. Since this merger an evaluation-oriented quality management system (QMS) has been implemented successively.
Institutional evaluation and target agreements between rectorate and all organizational units (i.e. faculties, central service units, administration etc.) form the basis of the quality management system of UDE. The Centre for Higher Education Development and Quality Enhancement (CHEDQE) and the department for planning are in charge of these processes.
Since 2005 institutional evaluations have been conducted as flexible processes bundling different tools for quality assurance (course evaluation, tracer studies and other quantitative and qualitative methods). They were conducted in order to stimulate self-reflexion processes within the respective organizational units, leading to a deduction of developmental measures. These measures finally were part of the target agreements in order to close the quality loop. According to this concept, institutional evaluation as one single procedure was aiming at two goals: supporting higher education governance and facilitating self-monitored development. Seven years of institutional evaluation have shown that this concept is actually not accurately fitting UDE’s organizational character any more.
Thus, a reconsideration process started aiming at establishing a QMS catered even more to the UDE’s unique features.
The result was a new quality management concept, which is currently implemented. It subdivides two formats of institutional evaluation aiming at different goals:
1. rotational institutional evaluation as an element of higher education monitoring and governance, preparing target agreements
2. optional evaluations aiming at providing tightly-focused information for specific questions and developmental demands (to be commissioned either by the rectorate or any other organizational unit of UDE)
The paper to be presented will outline both the best-practice elements of the long standing institutional evaluation process as well as the newly developed elements based on a conceptual framework taking into account the university’s characteristics concerning structure, culture and external demands.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Petra Pistor, M.A. (German Language and Literature Studies) works as a quality manager at the Centre for Higher Education Development and Quality Enhancement (CHEDQE) of University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2012 she is head of the evaluation team. Amongst others, Petra Pistor was occupied with a variety of evaluation projects in the field of teaching, research and organizational structure. Currently, her working activities are focused on the design and realization of different evaluation projects as well as on the cooperation within different international projects on quality culture and capacity building within the field of quality assurance.
