Academic Leadership

Academic Leadership: Fundamental Building Blocks

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8.3 Monitoring Program Performance

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When using the Monitor role, you will regularly access and interpret information in order

to measure and monitor the ongoing performance of your program. It is important to

ensure that you have access to the right information and interpret it appropriately so that

any conclusions that you draw can ultimately be used to inform quality improvement

processes. Measuring the performance of an academic program requires you to focus

on several different types of information and a range of performance measures.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this activity is to assist your in identifying

measures of performance for your program and data to

facilitate monitoring against these measures.

Background Information

The performance of educational programs is generally measured in terms of student

learning outcomes. Commonly used measures of student learning outcomes include:

• The number of graduates who are in employment in a related field of study.


• Student satisfaction against a range of factors related to teaching and learning.


• Retention (the number of students who continue in and complete a program).


• Success (the number who progress from one year to the next).
  You may choose to monitor additional performance measures such as student
  complaints, staff teaching awards or the ‘triple bottom line’. The latter was defined in the
  1990s by John Elkington as relating to financial performance, social/ethical performance
  and environmental performance (as cited in Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, McGrath, & St.
  Clair 2007, p.136).
  All universities regularly collect and analyse data related to a range of internal and
  external measures around program quality. For example, the Australian Graduate
  Survey (AGS) which includes the Graduate Destinations Survey (GDS) and the Course
  Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) are external measures administered by the Graduate
  Careers Australia (GCA) to gather a broad range of information from graduates of
  Australian Universities. The information gathered from the AGS is used to compare the
  surveyed universities against a number of different performance measures defined by
  government – a major stakeholder in tertiary education.
  There have been many criticisms of the CEQ and there is undoubtedly some truth in
  some of them. The robustness and consistency over time of the national CEQ data
  makes it an important source of information for Academic Coordinators. Indeed, Patrick
  (2003) argues that at university level, the CEQ provides a performance measure which
  has currency and credibility as an established measure of student satisfaction and/or
  teaching quality.