Parallel - Integrating the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into Higher Education Quality Enhancement in Canada Nicola Simmons (Brock University), Gary Poole (University of British Columbia)

There are a lot of measures of quality now which include excellence, consistency, fit for purpose, value for money and transformation. Most attempts to explore this have been through rankings which do not always measure equally when considering the geographical areas and student background. Learning outcomes when used are often linked only to students grade not the wider outcomes and SoTl is not explored. However, how to define this activity is hard and support is increasing but is still limited.

Is there any relationship between SoTL and institutional quality? The speakers undertook an international survey, adapted from the Making Teaching Count survey (Rogers, 1997), to further understand relationships between the nature of SoTL work, its dissemination, and institutional quality. Questions were asked about academic position and involvement with SoTL, as well as how SoTL work was communicated. They also asked about SoTL’s influence on practice, policy, and student learning. These items were all Likert-type items and then there w ere four open-ended questions concerning institutional culture, quality education, and personal SoTL work and its intended outcomes on student learning. Collected data between June and August 2011 and 92 people completed this mostly from USA and Canada.

In terms of institutional culture the median score was 44 on a scale that went up to 75. Reasons for responses included a feeling that most institutions did not really value teaching and learning. 85% of the respondents thought that SoTL did improve teaching practice and their student learning and 67% though they had influenced others. 85% agreed their teaching was influenced by research others conducted. They did not generally feel others were influenced by their work. 64% felt that their teaching practice does affect the overall quality in their institution. 90% said they communicated work through presentations at their institutions, conferences and articles.

Recommendations include better in-house dissemination and recognition and better measures of institutional quality.