(1812) PROMOTING PAPERLESS APPROACHES TO QUALITY ASSURANCE AND ENHANCEMENT PROCEDURES: A UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTAL CASE STUDY

摘要

The paperless office remains an unfulfilled goal for many businesses and organisations. In the HigherEducation context the number and diversity of information and IT systems, coupled with a historicexpectation of academic freedom and individual practice, has often militated against drives towardspaperless quality assurance.The complex and sometimes fluid management structures in Higher Education (HE) coupled with theunpredictability of budgets and complex planning processes account in part for a typical melange ofinformation systems, often procured piecemeal, and variable practice in their usage at the local level.Often data has to be exported from one system and massaged before being input into another. Whatmight appear to be a simple activity - such as marking a student script - might require access to astudent record system, a virtual learning environment, a portal, a University Website, a plagiarismdetection facility and so on. Marking of student work has for many years featured aspects of electronicsubmission, electronic marking and interoperability between systems. However, submission of paperbasedartefacts and marking by provision of handwritten comments and feedback is stillcommonplace. The goal of eliminating paper submissions has often been impeded by concerns oversatisfying other quality assurance procedures or by the concerns of individuals and groups aboutchanges to their working practices.This paper presents a case study showing how judicious implementation and exploitation of systemsand careful design of human processes can assist in the elimination of paper artefacts in themanagement and delivery of study programmes in HE. The project was undertaken through a desireto achieve better communications with all stakeholders in the academic processes and to achieve aricher staff and student experience. The outcome was a number of streamlined procedures, improvedstudent engagement and better management information. Additional benefits in the studentexperience, in external examination processes and in the archiving of historic data were also obtained.