Kelley J. Burton

Peer review of teaching (PRoT) in higher education – a practitioner’s reflection

Abstract Peer review of teaching (PRoT) is recommended to both develop and assure the quality of teaching practices in Higher Education. An institutional implementation of a peer review process can be viewed as a genuine desire to improve teaching quality or as an instrument of accountability and performativity. There are many approaches to the peer review of teaching operating. This article documents the impact, advantages and disadvantages of direct participation in three peer review of teaching processes.

Assuring the quality of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment across satellite campuses

Abstract Assuring the quality of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is an increasingly significant issue in higher education. This article explores the potential benefit of ‘consensus planning’, an ongoing curriculum development, maintenance and monitoring strategy, to achieve consistency of academic standards for student learning and assessment across multiple campuses. This article specifically reports on a ‘consensus planning’ audit undertaken within the School of Education at a regional university in Queensland that engaged full-time academic staff across two campuses. Results suggest that the success of consensus planning is contingent on the personalities of academics; attitudes towards reaching consensus and top-down policy measures; and geographical proximity of the campuses. To ameliorate some of the barriers to consensus planning it is recommended that higher education institutions build the capacity of academics, supporting them to create curriculum where ‘equivalence’ is as accepted as ‘sameness’, and where debate and bottom-up practice and policy recommendation is valued.