Internal Quality Assurance Practice in Slovakia -some Remarques Jan Bujnak University of Zilina Slovakia

Partners involved: -Students: knowledge in the chosen field, good degree, diplomas -Employers: qualified and trained graduates -University: enough knowledge, skills to study -Teachers: appropriate knowledge from the previous courses, -Society: educated and responsible people.

Different approaches to the quality in education: - Quality from the didactic point of view – optimization of the teaching and learning process, - Quality from the economic point of view – education costs, - Quality from the social point of view – social demand for education, - Quality from the consumer point of view – demand of students, employers, parents, Quality from the management point of view – optimization of organization of education.

Issues to control: - Teaching methods, - Tutorial methods-students with learning difficulty, - Students feedback, - Monitoring of students progress, - Checks of student needs meeting, - Student progress assessment

Techniques of control: - student´ questionnaires, - external stakeholders, employers, and professional bodies, - meeting of course/field committees, - meeting of subject boards, Who: Administration, Staff development units, Quality assurance divisions.

What: -Evaluation of student knowledge to determine the quality of teaching and learning -level of knowledge, skills and habits necessary for future occupations -variety of methods and means of revision determined by individual study programs

How: Student's feedback can be provided in several ways: -individual discussions during consultation hours or friendly dialogues, -discussions in seminars – group attitude, -mutual discussions of teachers to share experiences, -mutual observations of lectures or seminars, -tutors playing a role of intermediary between groups and the management, -participation of students in management meetings, -regularly meetings of management and students communities, -questionnaires

Management should check: - credits systems, especially in the first two years, - content of new subjects, their continuity with other subject, - overlapping of contents of different subjects, -quality of study materials, -organization of exams, especially during the last year of study.

Advantage of using questionnaires: -easily distributed, collected, evaluated, finding out opinions of great number of students at the same time, -easily gaining information about teacher's work, -to help teachers to better recognize the content or difficulty of the lectures, seminars and exercises, -to motivate the students to participate in solving real problems,

Critical objectives to questionnaires: -non-objective evaluation because on dependency on such variable as sympathy, degree of acceptability, size of group and the way of interpretation, -influence of facts as the gender of respondent, looks of rooms, -concentration only on the negative features of teacher's work, respondents ignorance.

Basic considerations: -Who will organize the measurement- teachers, students parliement, employers, external agency. -Who made questionnaires, -questionnaires is voluntary, semi-voluntary or obligatory, -used in every group or in every subject, -time-table in organizing, standard or non-standard form.

Very brief and effortless questionnaire with only 3 questions: -What were the BEST features of the course -What were the WORST feature of the course, -In what ways the course could be improved. If we expect student´s suggestions: -content of subject, -methodology of the lecture interpretation, -intensity of subject, -level of providing with study materials, -way of continuous assessment during semester, -condition of obtaining credits, exams.

The complex questionnaire: -man or female, -accommodation, -study success, -study conditions, -teaching methodology, -difficulty of subject, -comparison with the other similar subject, -study material available, -relation to previous and following subjects, -percentage of your attendance, -weekly hours of self-study, -is the number of teaching hours sufficient, level of difficulty of exams, -suggestion for improvement.