Learning and Teaching Committee

Subject: Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2010

Origin: Programme Quality and Teaching Partnerships Office

The University is participating this year for the first time in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES). This is run by the Higher Education Academy, and has been developed following the success of their Postgraduate Research Student Survey (PRES). PTES ran for the first time in 2009. It is the intention that PTES and PRES will run in alternate years from now on.

PTES has a learning and teaching focus. It is divided into several short sections. The first asks students about their motivations to undertake a PGT programme. This is followed by a further nine sections each asking about a different, broad area of their experience and overall satisfaction:

Quality of teaching and learning

Assessment and feedback

Dissertation

Organisation and management

Learning resources

Skills and personal development

Career and professional development

Overall satisfaction

Further comments

A demographic section is included at the end which will enable checks to be made on the representativeness of the sample and to compare between different demographic groups in the analyses.

Further institution-specific questions can be added to the core and it is our intention to add a selection of questions to help assess the effectiveness of our Student Services and to elicit information relevant to the internationalisation strategy. These are under discussion with Nigel Thomas and Chris Backhouse. It will be important to bear in mind the overall length of the questionnaire.

The conduct and promotion of PTES will be our own responsibility.

PTES is entirely online and sits on the Bristol Online Surveys (BOS) website. LU institutional results will be accessible only to LU through our own BOS account. The HEA will not be able to see our data. Once the survey is open, we will be able to compare our results with the national aggregated results of all HEIs taking part (approximately 80), and to compare our results with a ‘benchmarking club’ (in our case the 1994 Group). Once the survey is closed, all individual datasets will be merged by the BOS team, and the data will be passed to the HEA for sector wide analysis. We will be responsible for analysing our own institutional data. We will then be able to compare our own results with the national aggregate and with the aggregated results for participating 1994 Group institutions. The list of participating institutions is confidential to BOS and the HEA and no data will be shared with third parties (no league tables).

A provisional list of some 2100 participants has been drawn up, including all PGT students, full- and part-time.

For LU students, the survey will run from 16 April until 28 May 2010 (the last possible window before the survey closes).