Managing quality in course staging — A working paper

Abstract

We describe how the Institute for Government Informatics Professionals, an educational arm of the Federal Government of Canada, manages the quality of its university-level informatics and professional business courses. The focus is on Course Staging: Course Staging and Course Maintenance refer to the two service quality loops that the Institute and its partners, a Consortium of three Canadian Universities, use to model the Institute's course development process. We describe the initial course development process and subsequent changes; explain the approach to formal course specification in terms of Knowledge Units and Entry/Exit Levels of Competence; list the difficulties encountered with this specification approach; and outline the surveys that we use to get feedback from students during and at the completion of Institute courses. We plan to use this working paper as the basis for consultations with educators in like institutions, sharing with them practical and proven approaches to managing quality in education.