Quality assurance

Providing high quality education is very important for the department of Electrical Engineering. To improve and maintain the quality it is essential that every educational component, as well as the program as a whole, is subject to structural and recurrent evaluation.

The most common method of evaluation is by conducting surveys. Courses and projects are evaluated with online surveys in Evalytics. The results of the surveys enable us to collect the thoughts and opinions of students and give them the opportunity to provide feedback on their education. Educational components that are new will be evaluated for 3 consecutive years using surveys until they reach a sufficient level (see quality assurance plan for the criteria). Components that have reached a sufficient level are evaluated once every 3 years (1 year evaluation, 2 years no evaluation). The results of the surveys, together with the pass rates of the course, input from the responsible teacher, and input from the StudentBody, are looked at and discussed by several stakeholders, such as the Quality Assurance Officer, the Program Leader, the Program Committee, the Examination Committee. If there are concerns about a course, an improvement plan will be requested from the responsible teacher. Next year, it will be monitored and evaluated to what extent the planned improvements have been successful.

The educational program as a whole is also subject to yearly evaluations, organized on a central level by TU/e. An important way of program evaluation is by analyzing the results of the NSE, the National Student Survey, that is conducted every year.

In addition to the surveys, the department makes use of other more direct methods of evaluation for educational components. Student meetings are organized for bachelor and master students (year councils) on a regular basis by StudentBody. This way students can provide direct feedback on their educational program to the staff. Compared to surveys, where evaluations take place at the end of the educational component, these types of evaluation methods are powerful tools for intermediate evaluations. For an overview of our evaluation instruments, see the quality assurance plan. 

The Quality Assurance officer of the department EE is dr. Els van Rooij. She is appointed by the department to maintain all the processes related to quality assurance and ensures that all responsible parties receive the information necessary to perform their duties. For example, the departmental QA officer maintains a record of course evaluations and determines which courses require evaluation, which policy should be used and communicates with the central QA officer of ESA on practicalities regarding the surveys. In addition to this, the QA officer attends meetings with other departmental QA officers to discuss general matters and developments related to quality assurance. The QA officer also writes the departmental QA plan every year.

Based on the framework of accreditation developed by the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organisation (Dutch abbreviation: NVAO), all educational programs are subject to periodic evaluation by writing a self-evaluation report and by a visiting panel. Accreditation is a formal decision that the educational program complies to the quality demands formulated by the NVAO and that the graduation diploma is recognized as valid by the government. Accreditation lasts for 6 years. The most recent accreditation of the educational programs of EE was in 2022.

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