Quality assurance

The department of Electrical Engineering (EE) is the final responsible department of the interdisciplinary master’s program AI&ES.

Providing high quality education is of utmost importance to the department of EE. To maintain the quality it is essential that every educational component 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 enables the program  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 evaluated by several stakeholders, such as the Program Committee AI&ES, Examination Committee AI&ES, the Progarm Leader AI&ES, Quality Assurance officer and the responsible lecturer/teacher. 

Should there be any concerns about a course, an improvement plan will be requested from and implemented by the responsible lecturer/teacher. The following year these components are monitored based on the evaluation and the improvement plan. After this the cycle of quality assurance starts again.  

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 in the Downloads section below. 

A quality assurance (QA) officer 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.

The Quality Assurance officer of the department EE is dr. Els van Rooij, who can be contacted via EE.Quality.Assurance@remove-this.tue.nl.

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 is valid for 6 years. The most recent accreditation (which was also the first one, that took place before the program started) of the master’s program AI&ES was in 2021.

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