Trends and Outlook

Posted: 25/07/2019

Working in over 30 universities, here at DVE, we have the opportunity of seeing trends emerge within the Higher Education sector that goes beyond the university and campus nuances.

This gives us valuable insight into where the sector is heading and what Higher Education providers need to be considering in the months and years ahead.

Improving Curriculum Management

Managing curriculum, course approval workflows, governance and publishing of course information is a complex and time-consuming activity in all universities. It includes many stakeholders and significant time delays, with often no single source of truth for curriculum information. Curriculum management has been one of those functions not addressed by systems in the last decade, but there is change on the way!

Many major system transformation projects are underway across the sector in several key areas, and Curriculum Management systems are at the top of the list. There are several systems in the market, but as always we recommend mapping your processes first and ensuring your system fits to a best practice process rather than fitting your processes to the constraints of a system.

For this reason, we have been very impressed with Factor5’s CourseLoop system as it is highly configurable and readily tailored to your specific requirements. We have been assisting in implementing CourseLoop in a number of universities now and seeing some great results.

If you’re thinking about improving your curriculum management processes or system, please get in touch, and we can update you on progress in this area within the sector.

Overhauling Credit Management Processes

Managing credit is another critical function yet highly manual function that has needed an overhaul. The management of credit is an essential and important activity for all universities, and the approach to this must be rigorous to comply with the TEQSA Standards.

Many universities have created complex spreadsheets to capture their credit information (very prone to data errors!). There are usually multiple files in each faculty and school with time-consuming processes to assess and apply the credit. Most frustratingly for staff, there is limited management and sharing of precedent information across and, often within, faculties.

We have been heavily involved in improving credit management processes in the last ten years and are now working with several universities and technology providers to get robust systems into more universities.

There are a number of bespoke systems being developed and knowledge sharing across universities is in progress. We are really keen to talk to more of you about what you’re doing, what we’re seeing other universities doing and about new system that has just been implemented in an Australian university – so if credit management is a pain point for you, please reach out,we’d love to hear from you.

Governance aligning to TEQSA requirements

Did you know that 81% of TEQSA’s adverse findings in initial registrations is Governance? (source: TEQSA Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, September 2018)

In the 2018 Assessment Insights report released by TEQSA, it was revealed that the majority of the agency’s decisions to reject an Australian Higher Education provider application for registration and re-registration were made due to serious concerns about the adequacy of applicants’ corporate and academic governance arrangements.

Your Governance has a cascading effect; both in Corporate and Academic. Assessors report that they often look at Governance first, as its an indicator of the quality of the submission; if the institution can’t get governance right, then it is difficult to get anything else right due to the flow-on nature.

Talk to us today about a ‘health check’ with our Senior Higher Education Consultants; who are members of TEQSA’s panel of experts and can help advise you on the appropriate governance you need.  You may also be interested in reading our article on the common mistakes in TEQSA applications – and how to avoid them.