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PERFORMANCE DATA GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION LEARNING AND TEACHING: A GUIDELINE
Abstract
See also https://www.evalag.de/sqelt/ and https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-project-de-tails/#project/b8a93e06-2000-4a82-9fac-90b3bcacadec
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Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a crucial role in implementing practices for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This implementation should be done in different dimensions according to a holistic and whole-school approach. Different tools have been adapted and developed to assess this integrated approach. The aim of this research is to critically reflect the existing tools to assess and benchmark ESD implementation and to discuss their applicability in two case studies. Two public Universities in Southern Europe, with headquarters in the capitals of Portugal and Spain were selected to assess and compare the integration of ESD according to a whole-school approach—Universidade Aberta in Portugal and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. After a critical analysis of the existing tools based on literature review and a list of criteria classified by experts, two tools were selected to be applied in the case studies. The online Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System Reporting Tool was used in Universidade Aberta and Green Metrics tool was used in Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The tools were complemented with focus group with key-actors in both universities. The results obtained allowed to identify the need to define a common objective of the assessment tools and limitations they still have. The tools need improvements on their development namely to integrate the external impact of Higher Education Institutions on sustainability, to integrate participatory processes and to assess non-traditional aspects of sustainability. This research hopes to contribute to the continuous research about the usefulness of these assessment and benchmarking tools as drivers to HEIs improve their sustainability performance and their role as agents of changes.
Education for sustainable development (ESD) provides a means of ensuring healthy living environments by raising awareness of climate change, pollution, mental and physical health risks and the need for environmental protection. Sustainable development is an urgent task for our society and is attracting increasing attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs), like all other organisations within our society, are called upon to deal with the associated challenges. The task of HEIs is to deal theoretically, conceptually, methodically, critically, and reflectively with the processes and conditions of transformation, in order to contribute towards ensuring that sustainability is implemented in a specific organizational context. The paper introduces a tool with which HEI's can assess their sustainability governance.
The notion of green growth has emerged as a dominant policy response to climate change and ecological breakdown. Green growth theory asserts that continued economic expansion is compatible with our planet’s ecology, as technological change and substitution will allow us to absolutely decouple GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions. This claim is now assumed in national and international policy, including in the Sustainable Development Goals. But empirical evidence on resource use and carbon emissions does not support green growth theory. Examining relevant studies on historical trends and model-based projections, we find that: (1) there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth, and (2) absolute decoupling from carbon emissions is highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. We conclude that green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies.
This project brought together learning analytics experts from across Australia to explore key ethical issues relating to the development and use of learning analytics in higher education. The result of these discussions was a discussion paper that provides an outline of seven ethical principles as well as practical considerations associated with the use of learning analytics.
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) have started to incorporate sustainable development (SD) into their system. A variety of sustainability assessment tools (SATs) have been developed to support HEIs to systematically measure, audit, benchmark, and communicate SD efforts. In recent years, stakeholders have increasingly asked HEIs to demonstrate their impacts on SD. These impacts are the direct and indirect effects an HEI has outside of its organizational boundaries on society, the natural environment, and the economy. This study analyzes to what extent SATs are capable of measuring the impacts that HEIs have on SD. A mixed-method approach, using descriptive statistics and an inductive content analysis, was used to examine 1134 indicators for sustainability assessment derived from 19 SATs explicitly designed for application by HEIs. The findings reveal that SATs largely neglect the impacts HEIs have outside their organizational boundaries. SATs primarily use proxy indicators based on internally available data to assess impacts and thus tend to focus on themes concerning the natural environment and the contribution to the local economy. Updating existing SATs and developing new ones may enable HEIs to fully realize their potential to contribute to SD.
The safe and just space framework devised by Raworth calls for the world’s nations to achieve key minimum thresholds in social welfare while remaining within planetary boundaries. Using data on social and biophysical indicators provided by O’Neill et al., this paper argues that it is theoretically possible to achieve a good life for all within planetary boundaries in poor nations by building on existing exemplary models and by adopting fairer distributive policies. However, the additional biophysical pressure that this entails at a global level requires that rich nations dramatically reduce their biophysical footprints by 40–50%. Extant empirical studies suggest that this degree of reduction is unlikely to be achieved solely through efforts to decouple GDP growth from environmental impact, even under highly optimistic conditions. Therefore, for rich nations to fit within the boundaries of the safe and just space will require that they abandon growth as a policy objective and shift to post-capitalist economic models.
The performance appraisal (PA) is one of the performance management tools that is widely used to measure the productivity of academic employees in different contexts. Therefore, this paper has two main objectives. Firstly, it critically reviews the extant literature on performance management, including; Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard Approach, among others. Secondly, it presents a qualitative research that explores the performance appraisal system in a higher education institution. The researcher has conducted semi-structured interview sessions with academic employees to analyse their opinions and perceptions toward their annual PA. The research participants revealed the costs and benefits of their PA exercise. They were aware that their educational leaders could pragmatically employ the PA’s metrics to improve their performance outcomes, in terms of stakeholder engagement, internal processes, organisational capacity and innovation, among other areas. This research implies that the PA instrument could lead to significant benefits for both the institution as well as for the personal development of individual academics.
The creation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) represents a significant development concerning the teaching mission of the university in the UK. This paper considers the background to, and the development of, the TEF. It explains the context from which the TEF emerged and unpacks a series of rationales which illustrate the need for, and the role of, the new framework. The TEF is presented as an instrument to fulfil a range of functions, including: a mechanism to determine tuition fee rises and inform student choices in a reconfigured higher education market; a means of updating the quality and regulatory regime; and a way of raising the esteem of teaching within the academy, and the importance institutions place on student education. The paper explains how the contested idea of “teaching excellence” is defined within the framework, and the metrics and methodology used to assess this. An overview of the submission process and results illustrates how the TEF works in practice. How the TEF embeds two agendas in higher education is discussed: the use of quantitative measures to capture and convey performance, and the role of the student as a consumer not just a learner. The paper concludes the TEF can be viewed as a multi-purpose evaluation tool, not merely designed by the imperatives of teaching excellence or quality assurance, but also by the need for a measure to provide market information to consumers and allocate fee increases to institutions, and this is reflected in its content and character.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the current literature on data governance in scientific and practice-oriented publications, and to provide a comparative analysis of the activities reported for data governance. Data have become a key organisational asset and data governance both a necessary and critical activity.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive literature review is conducted in order to identify the published material that reflects the current state of knowledge. A systematic procedure was followed that identified 61 publications that explicitly mention data governance activities. Open coding techniques were applied to conduct content analysis, resulting in the identification of 591 concepts. A critical analysis also identified gaps in the literature.
Findings
The analysis identified 120 data governance activities which are understood as: “action” plus “area of governance” plus “decision domain” (e.g. define data policies for data quality). The authors define and present a data governance activities model based on the analysis. The analysis also shows a higher volume of data governance activities reported by practice-oriented publications that are associated with the “implement” and “monitor” actions of the areas of governance across the decision domains compared with scientific publications, whereas The authors found that the scientific publications focus more on defining activities. The results contribute to identifying research gaps and concerns on which ongoing and future research efforts can be focused.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is of interest to both academics and practitioners, as it helps them understand the activities associated with a data governance programme. Current literature fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of the data governance activities that are required when considering a data governance programme. Therefore, the proposed model for data governance activities can be used to give insights into these activities.
Originality/value
To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first to explicitly consider data governance activities from both an academic and practice-oriented perspective.