You may have heard someone mention the Academic Dashboard, but unless you’re involved with the reporting process, you probably don’t know a lot about it. While it’s a tool that’s mainly used by HoPPs, the Academic Board and the Te Korowai Kahurangi team at the moment, the Academic Dashboard is a great example of how we’re taking a consistent approach to building and monitoring academic quality across Unitec.
The dashboard was developed last year in response to the 2016 EER report, which called out our inconsistent approach to self-assessment across programmes and Pathways.
The solution is an Excel dashboard that assesses how each Pathway is doing against key criteria focused on academic compliance, self-assessment and educational performance. Red, amber and green traffic lights are used to signal successes and areas for improvement to the Academic Board every three months.
Academic Quality Director, Shirley Wilson said: “This dashboard will become an important source of evidence and data for the next NZQA assessment in November of this year. We need to show that we’re doing the right things in the right way across all of our programmes, and that we’re assessing our strengths and weaknesses in a consistent way.”
We’re now developing a web-based version that will go live later this year and will give everyone a view at the all Unitec, Pathway and Programme level. At present copies of the dashboards are available from Te Korowai Kahurangi (formerly Academic Service Centre).