Using Academic Program Review to Enhance Teaching

Academic Program Review (APR) is an opportunity for programs to reflect on their current state and seek advice from colleagues outside our institution. This opportunity only comes around once per decade, so it is important to think about how best to use APR to support teaching and learning in your programs. The process is led by Assessment and Analytics, with support from the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) for any aspects that are about the teaching and learning environments.

David Greaves is GMCTL’s primary contact with respect to APR. Below are some questions and answers provided by David to help you get the most from APR, whether you’ve already gone through it or if you’re eagerly awaiting your turn. If you have questions about the logistics of APR, including the schedule, please visit the main APR webpage.

Why is APR important for teaching enhancement?

APR is an opportunity to step back and take a look at the bigger picture of teaching and learning in your programs. Where are your students thriving? Where could you use some more support? Sometimes the answers to these questions only become apparent as we zoom out and ask the right questions.

Is APR a reason to be concerned?

Not at all! APR gives units a good amount of control over its focus, reviewer recruitment, and more. There is no pass, fail, or any rating system at all – just helpful recommendations to improve your programs for years to come. In other words, its intent is to provide you with formative feedback on your programs.

Having said that, doing a good job of APR will be a fair amount of work for your unit’s staff and faculty. We recommend planning fewer other big projects to coincide with APR if it can be helped to ensure everyone has the capacity to put the time and energy into APR to make the most of it.

How can we make the most of each stage of APR for teaching enhancement?

There are three phases of the APR, each presenting different opportunities:

1. Self-Study. The self-study is where you collect data about your program’s current state and write some commentary about those data. Often, faculty view the self-study as a document to inform the external reviewers. Though it serves that purpose, units that make the best use of the self-study also use it as an opportunity to reflect deeply on their current state. To fuel this reflection, my suggestion is to work with GMCTL to engage in some supplemental reporting about your teaching and learning environment, and/or workshops that can fuel faculty reflection. When we run workshops linked to APR, we can also provide written summaries of the results, realizations, and commitments from that workshop that can be added to your self-study as an appendix.

2. External Review. Your external reviewers will only have 2 days to learn enough about your programs to make recommendations. If you don’t give them enough information, they may come back with recommendations that you could have reached on your own with enough thought and reflection. Consider where external perspectives would have the most impact on teaching and learning so that you can best equip your reviewers to comment on those areas.

3. Following the Site Visit. After the site visit, you will receive your external reviewer’s report and are asked to write a response to their recommendations. As you craft your response, consider this your opportunity to set longer-term goals as a unit, including metrics you can monitor longer-term to better articulate your progress towards achieving those goals. GMCTL can support your data needs at this stage, as well as any professional learning that may support your program in getting there.

How far along in my curriculum change should I be for APR?

APR is your chance to identify opportunities for changes in your programs. As such, we recommend getting far enough in your curriculum change that you have a sense of your future direction, but not so far that you won’t be able to pivot if there are new understandings that arise from your review. A changing curriculum can be good fuel for conversation when reviewers are on site. Consider discussing the current state of your program with GMCTL staff to go over the stages of curriculum changes, including at which stage an external perspective would be most helpful.

How does APR fit in with our accreditation?

Our Assessment and Analytics colleagues have worked with units in the past to align APR with accreditation reporting requirements to avoid duplicating efforts. If you have concerns about this, reach out to discuss timing and what can be done centrally to synergize those processes.

What can GMCTL do to support us with APR?

This will vary according to your needs, the following are just some examples of how we might be able to support you:

• Attend your unit’s meetings about APR, whether that’s a recurring commitment or on an as-needed basis.
• Run workshops for your faculty to help you and your colleagues reflect on the topics within the self-study. By request, we can produce a written summary of those reflections and commitments to include in your appendix.
• Create ad-hoc reports. If there are teaching and learning data that may be helpful, work with us to access those data even if there aren’t existing reports that make them easy to find. Check out our learning analytics page for more information about custom analytics projects.
• Invite GMCTL to meet with your external reviewers during their site visit. Based on your unit’s goals for APR, we can invite whoever fits best.
• Help with goal-setting, action planning, and measurement plans following the review. We can suggest some metrics that would best measure the impact of the changes made.
• Check in with you regularly following the review, especially if we work with you on action planning and impact measurement.

We look forward to supporting you with your APR, and we welcome any additional curiosities you have.

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.