Student Engagement with Quality Assurance and Enhancement Activities
At DkIT, the student voice is valued and the Institute works in partnership with students and is committed to student involvement in quality assurance and enhancement activities. The Institute is also committed to being responsive to student feedback. The Institute recognises that students have a major contribution to make through review and feedback on their experiences at the Institute.
Students have representation on a range of Institute decision making fora:
| Forum | Student Representation |
| Governing Body | The Students’ Union President and Vice President are ex-officio members. |
| Academic Council | The Students Union President and Vice President are ex-officio members. There are student representatives on some sub-committees. The ‘Student Voice’ is a rolling item on the agenda for Academic Council meeting. |
| Programme Boards | Each programme stage has student representation on these Boards. |
| Review and Development Activities | Students are invited to participate in such activities as they arise, e.g., Programme validations, Programmatic Reviews, Institutional Reviews, Learning and Teaching Scholarship activities. |
The following primary mechanisms are employed to obtain student feedback on their student experience in DkIT:
| Undergraduate | Postgraduate Research |
| Programme level feedback (QA3) to Heads of Department on a semester basis. | Participation in the annual postgraduate research student feedback survey. |
| Participation in the annual student feedback survey StudentSurvey.ie | Participation in the bi-annual postgraduate student feedback survey PGR StudentSurvey.ie. |
Other student feedback surveys are carried out periodically, including:
- Student surveys that are carried out as part of cyclical five-yearly School Programmatic Reviews;
- First year students are surveyed following their induction;
- Surveys are carried out to ascertain student views on various services and/or academic initiatives;
- Recent graduates are surveyed each year between 6-9 months after graduation as part of the HEA Graduate Outcomes Survey by the Careers and Employability Centre. The Centre also conducts a national survey CIBYL - which is a Survey of all Higher Education Careers Services in Ireland and UK. Both of these surveys serve as part of national benchmarking and as a student feedback mechanism.
The data collected by these feedback surveys, and subsequent analysis, enables the Institute to monitor and continuously enhance the student experience along both academic and non-academic dimensions. DkIT values the importance of evidence-based decision making and so student intake, progression and graduation data is provided to academic Schools each year for consideration by Programme Boards as part of the programme monitoring process.
See AQR Part B for information on monitoring activities (Academic, Professional Support Units (Student Services), Postgraduate Research, etc.) completed during the reporting period.
