Chapter 12 - Quality Assurance and Enhancement for Co-curricular Programmes offered by the Office of Student Affairs
12.1
The co-curricular learning opportunities offered by the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) are aligned with the University’s best practices and subject to specific quality assurance (QA) and enhancement measures.
12.2
The co-curricular programmes go through a full cycle of planning, implementation, monitoring and feedback collection. At the beginning stage, OSA staff conduct research on the needs of students and on the relevance of the envisaged programmes to the outcomes that the students are expected to achieve. Feedback collected from the identified stakeholders (e.g. students, instructors and working partners) of previous programmes is also reviewed. After thisinitial fact-gathering phase, discussion amongst the OSA staff, including the Director, takes place and this subsequently leads to the finalisation of a fully developed programme in which the format, content, and mode of delivery are clearly articulated.
12.3
With the programme skeleton fixed, endorsement from the upper authority, such as the Vice-President (Academics) cum Provost and/or other authorities, where applicable, will be sought. Taking the case of Integrated Learning Programme (ILP) as an example, its course proposals need to be forwarded to the Management Committee of ILP (terms of reference and membership in the Appendix), which is a committee under the Senate, for approval.
12.4
During the implementation of a given programme, regular communication with coordinators, instructors and the students is expected, as are class visits. Moreover, attendance records will be established and filed, to ensure satisfactory uptake and progress, and to facilitate analysis with an eye to continuous improvement.
12.5
After completion of the programme, students are requested to fill in an evaluation questionnaire to give feedback and self-reflection on their learning experiences. The design of the evaluation questionnaire is based on the attributes of ideal graduates in an outcome-based manner. These attributes relate to the following areas, 1) Leadership, 2) Entrepreneurship, 3) Well-being 12-2 (Physical), 4) Well-being (Mental), 5) Language Enhancement, 6) CrossCultural Appreciation and Integration, 7) Sustainability, 8) Digital Literacy, 9) Career Development, and 10) Others. Some programmes require students to be involved in both pre- and post-programme self-evaluations so as to facilitate measurement of the changes relating to personal growth induced by the programme. Moreover, focus group interviews and review meetings are conducted to collect in-depth evaluation on major programmes such as the ILP, mentorship programmes, internship programmes, and New Student Orientation. The findings, relevant statistics and other observations on the programmes are recorded and analysed for future reference.
12.6
There are regular meetings at different levels within the OSA (e.g. core meeting, division meeting, team meeting and office meeting) to evaluate overall programme effectiveness. The annual report also serves as an inevitable means to assess the programme quality.
12.7
The use of Business Intelligence (BI) with reference to programmes relating to 1) experiential learning and 2) residential experience aims to provide relevant information for reviewing their effectiveness, all in a bid to better planning and quality enhancement in the future.
12.8
Given that students have increasingly relied on social media to communicate among themselves and express views of public issues, the OSA chooses to monitor these platforms (e.g. discussion forum on LIHKG, and subject pages on Instagram and Xiaohongshu) periodically to keep abreast of students’ comments on and feedback to the University’s updated policies and new measures.
12.9
To further improve OSA programmes, benchmarking with other University units and with the counterparts of other institutions is conducted regularly. The active participation of the OSA officers in the Hong Kong Student Services Association, a body comprising local student affairs personnel, facilitates an exchange of ideas and experiences on relevant issues, thereby strengthening the professional development of these staff in return.
12.10
The OSA’s co-curricular programmes complement students’ formal curriculum at the University and play a cardinal role in students’ whole-person development. Well-established QA processes are designed to ensure that students’ co-curricular learning meets the expected standards.
