Standards in Higher Education Task Force

Report of 2008/2009 Activities

Membership

The Task Force lost a founding member, Jennifer Soutter (University of Windsor) who was founding chair and continued source of inspiration. 

Over the summer, Leeanne Romane, (University of Waterloo) joined the Task Force.

Late in the year, Donna Bourne-Tyson (Mount Saint Vincent University) left the Task Force to pursue other opportunities and Lynne Murphy (St. Francis Xavier University) joined in order to fill the quota of east coast rabble-rousers. 

 

Activities

Work of the Task Force’s website and associated pages and blogs was completed after filing the 2007/08 report.

In the Fall, the Task Force got off to a slow start, entirely due to the dereliction of the Chair, but aided by a parting post to the blog by Jennifer, got itself organized anew and is now embarking on a benchmarking project.  This project is further described on the second page of this report, but it can be described briefly as an attempt to create benchmarks (mean, median and percentile values) from the annual survey completed by universities in Canada and administered by CARL. 

If institutions can compare their own responses to the benchmark values for each question, it will be easier to determine where kudos are warranted and where decisions about reallocating effort need to be made. 

The regional associations (COPPUL, OCUL, CREPUQ and CAUL) are being contacted seeking permission for CARL to release the responses to the 2006/07 survey to the Task Force.

There is some potential for a charge to CACUL in order to cover the cost of formatting the output from the CARL database in a way that will make the review of the data by the Task Force most effective.  The Task Force will approach the Executive for that support when the amount becomes known.  It is unlikely to reach $1000, but a soft allocation of that amount is probably in order.

Submitted on behalf of the Task Force.

 

Richard H. Ellis, Chair