from the Vice Chancellor
Audit finds UniSA is travelling well
Quality
and quality assurance of higher education have been on the agenda of
politicians and media organisations recently.
As the number of Australian students continues to grow and Australian
universities offer education to tens of thousands of people from other
countries it is not surprising that there is considerable interest in
and, indeed, concern about the quality of the education which is being
delivered and the adequacy of university systems for assuring quality.
As a response to these concerns, a national, independent body – the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) was established to audit Australian universities every five years.
UniSA was audited earlier this year and the audit report has just been publicly released. The independent audit team reviewed the University’s portfolio which was the outcome of its self assessment, then spent four days in Adelaide, visited three countries to look at our offshore programs and interviewed close to 400 people – students, staff, Council members and partners.
We are delighted with the results which give overwhelming endorsement to the University’s systems of governance and administration, its review and planning process and its systems for quality assurance. The message from the report is that the audit team found the institution to be dynamic, flexible, well governed and sure of itself and its directions.
There are 16 commendations about good practice in the report and it is instructive that seven are about institutional policy settings and frameworks – review and planning process, governance reviews, management systems, management of change, course and program evaluation and review, quality assurance for offshore programs and our systems to support research education. They are saying the right systems, frameworks and policies are in place and are working.
For those of us who work in UniSA it was terrific to read that the audit team thought some of the things we think we do well or consider distinctive were worthy of commendation also. We were commended for our success in introducing flexible delivery of programs, our capacity to find and implement technological solutions to support our work, the information and support services we provide for international students, our attention to the development needs of our staff, the work of the Flexible Learning Centre and the Library, the management of the Blueprint capital program, the training of members of promotion committees and for the UniSA Northern Adelaide Partnerships Program – UNAP.
The team has made 10 recommendations for action which we will consider carefully. While all provide useful feedback about where we might improve, none draws attention to major deficiencies or highlights areas for immediate concern. Of course, we think they failed to commend us on many other things we do well but we accept that it is unusual for there to be complete correspondence between the views of an auditor and an auditee!
The University has emerged very well from the AUQA process. The public
report paints a very positive picture of what we have achieved in the last
few years. Such achievements are not the result of the action of a few
individuals. The whole institution is the subject of the audit and of the
report. The auditors own words suggest we are travelling well.