Teaching quality reviews

The Teaching Quality Assurance and Review Office undertakes internal reviews. The review process should be regarded as a dialogue between a department and the School, through the Teaching Quality Assurance Committee (TQAC) in the first instance and then through the Academic Planning and Review Committee (APRC). The intention is to:

• provide a mechanism which will function as a review of teaching and learning at all levels, including research degree level, primarily for the School's own purposes but also as preparation for possible future external reviews (carried out by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), or the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA));
  
  
• consider all activities related to teaching and research training in departments, institutes and inter-departmental programmes;
  
  
• provide academic departments with an opportunity to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in their undergraduate and graduate provision, to identify obstacles to achieving their objectives for these areas, and to propose appropriate changes for consideration by the unit/s and to the School;
  
  
• provide the School with a means of monitoring departmental systems for assuring academic standards in teaching and learning, assessment, and research training; and
  
  
• help the School to identify potential areas for improvement, and to enable it to identify and disseminate good practice between units.

The review process covers all units on a five-yearly cycle. It is bicameral, in the sense of being conducted in two phases/ stages, with the TQAC review feeding into the review conducted by the APRC, which normally takes place in the following year.

The most recent review of the department took place during the 2001/02 academic year. For this review, the department produced a self evaluation document (see Information Systems Group Self Evaluation document (PDF)), and the results of the review are presented in a report (see Review of Educational Provision in the Information Systems Group (PDF)).

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