Quality Assurance of University Training The challenges of Formative Evaluation
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Abstract
Jacques Dejean [Dejean 04] affirms that "the quality of a service cannot be assessed in the same way as that of a product". Quality is an "ability to satisfy expressed or implicit needs" (ISO 8402 Standard) of customers . Quality assurance consists of implementing "all of the pre-established and systematic actions necessary to give the appropriate confidence that a product or service will meet the given quality requirements" (ISO 9000 Standard). It involves controlling the production process, from design to after-sales (compliance with ISO 9001, the most demanding standard), in order to limit sources of non-quality and to show the client that everything has been done to minimize the risk of dissatisfaction.
Training is an intangible asset, the quality of which is not easy to assess. It is difficult to objectify and the "satisfaction" of its "customers" goes against all demagoguery if we do not want to have a reductionist vision of the quality of training.
The training is co-produced by the various actors it concerns [Laurens 99]. It cannot therefore be fully programmed like a classic industrial process.
The quality of training cannot be obtained at the first try, it is workable and can be achieved after an iterative process. Each feedback loop carries a certain number of corrective or progressive actions to have a higher quality. To be objective, these corrective actions must come from a formative evaluation involving all the training stakeholders.
We will start our communication with an overview on the evaluation of university training, drawing particularly on European and American experiences. The following point presents the main lines of a quality assurance training approach for the case of the Algerian University. This approach is based on the consolidation of the respective formative evaluations of the different training lessons. Some indicators of a criteria evaluation grid are proposed in the fourth point with an example to concretize our proposals.
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