Commitment to quality assurance
As an AACSB accredited business school, we strive for continuous improvement of our curricula, programs, and teaching practices. Sauder's Assurance of Learning (AoL) initiative is the representation of our commitment to quality assurance of student learning through detailed, data-driven processes that can inform curriculum design.
Why is this process important?
We want to know how well students learn what we teach. This process follows through on the curriculum we design, and makes sure students are seeing, learning, and experiencing it. It answers the important basic questions (Adapted from "An Interpretation of AACSB Standards" 2013. Retrieved from the AACSB Website):
- What will our students learn in our program?
- How will they learn it?
- How will we know they have learned it or not?
- What will we do if they have not learned it?
How does AoL work?
The faculty at Sauder have collectively considered what students from each program should know and how they should be when they graduate. (These can be found, broken down by program, on the right under Program Goals.) For each program goal there is one or more specific, measurable learning objectives. The Learning Services team works with the faculty to identify the best places to measure student success in achieving these objectives. The results from these measurements are then provided to the faculty to make changes.
We are currently gathering assessment data and using it to inform curriculum changes to ensure that we are meeting program goals for each of the following degree programs: Bachelor of Commerce, MBA, Professional MBA, Master of Management, Masters of Business Analytics and Ph.D. This diagram illustrates this process:
What does this mean for students?
If you are a Sauder student, you don't have to do anything. The AoL process has nothing to do with your course grades. The Learning Services team will periodically take anonymous random samples of student work and use them to check our progress in meeting learning objectives.
What does this mean for faculty and instructors?
If work from your course is chosen to be measured as part of the AoL process, the Learning Services team may ask for samples of student work from a class, or for input in designing the rubrics we use to assess. We do not use this as part of evaluating instructors.
For more information:
A short overview called "Demystifying Assurance of Learning" is available on the AACSB website.
If you'd like to learn more on the Assurance of Learning process, please contact Peter Lukasik, Educational Assessment Specialist.