University Fails To Provide Accountability
Not our fault : both sides blame each other for lack of information on the TQi website.
Oxford University has failed to publish several reports on a website designed to introduce greater accountability to university courses. The University has failed to supply information to the TQI (Teaching Quality Information) website, despite repeated requests to do so. Assistant registrar Sally Powell, who is responsible for the uploading of the reports, claims the omissions are due to a multitude of technical problems. Website managers have denied the claims.
The site’s technical manager told The Oxford Student: “There are no current problems with uploading at the moment.” Compulsory details related to how the university measures and responds to the needs of employers are also not accessible through the website. The deadline for uploading the reports for courses reviewed last summer was the end of January 2005. Many departments, including larger ones such as Music, Maths and Physics, have no external reports available to view.
Undergraduate courses for the faculties of Law and Medical Sciences are also amongst those not listed, although the reports on the graduate courses in these departments are available. Although comments from the external examiners’ reports on individual courses do not have to be released, the University issues guidelines on what information they believe would be useful in the public domain. When received they should be uploaded onto the TQI website by the university.
Sally Powell has claimed many of the reports she has attempted to upload have not yet appeared on the website. She told The Oxford Student: “The system in operation has had many technical difficulties and a backlog of troubleshooting requests has built up. These will naturally have delayed publication schedules.” She also claimed: “The University of Oxford has queries outstanding dating back to June 2004.”
When contacted by The Oxford Student, HERO – the company which controls the website – denied these claims, stating: “We have dealt with all the queries we have received so far.” All institutions must publish several pieces of general information, including a section entitled ‘Employers Needs and Trends.’ The TQI programme manager Liz Morrow said universities do not need to comply if the information is clearly dealt with in their teaching and learning strategy.
But she added: “If the information is published elsewhere, details of the publication should be listed under the heading on the website.” Powell denied knowledge of this requirement. “That’s not the information we’ve been given,” she said. When asked whether the information was published elsewhere, she said: “The information issued to us didn’t say in any way that it was compulsory to publish it.”
She replied: “The site is not due to be officially launched until the summer and I think you will find a number of glitches at least until then.” She commented that HERO has been under-resourced but additional funding has only recently been granted. Morrow affirmed that HERO has received extra annual funding and additional staff have been appointed, “because of the developmental nature of the site”.
28th Apr 2005