Pixel International Conferences

Higher education is an especially complex service hence management of its quality is also a diverse task. Within higher education there are a variety of stakeholders – including i.e. students, government, accreditation committees, auditors, employers, and teaching and non-teaching staff – and each has their own view on what quality in tertiary education means. Therefore, higher education institutions are motivated to implement quality management systems which can capture more aspects of quality of their educational services, the traditional student evaluations are not sufficient any more. In this paper, the peer review of teaching program at Budapest University of Technology and Economics Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences is presented, and its methodology, results and experience are also discussed. The program reviews about 20 courses annually and involves almost 100 lecturers either taking part as peer tutor or tutee. The peer review observations, assessments and appraisals are made by peer teachers including colleagues with quality management, pedagogy or psychology background as well. The peer review program is completed by both student evaluations and lecturer self-evaluations, so these three aspects together provide a balanced feedback both to individuals on their teaching strengths and weaknesses and to the academic staff. In case of lecturers the aim is to improve their teaching practices. Results are utilized to facilitate the staff creating better internal teaching rules and identifying best practices. The peer review program is based on questionnaires covering the whole teaching process. The novelty of the presented approach is that it evaluates not only the classroom performance but its focus also includes course outlines briefs, teaching materials, course requirements, and processes of student evaluations. An important conclusion is that most observed and identified mistakes and failures are not connected with the classroom teaching activities but with other supplementary elements of the teaching process, such as course outlines, or informing the students.