Joshua Blease Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

Managing External Examiner Reports

Supervised by S.North

Abstract

As part of the University's quality assurance processes, each of our programmes of study has an external examiner. The examiners, who are not members of the University, review their programmes annually and complete a report. Currently this is done using a Microsoft Word template, which is emailed to colleagues in Learning and Teaching Services (LeTS). LeTS receives around 400 reports each year, which must then be sent to the Department and then the Faculty responsible for the programme to be checked and comment on.

The project aim is to design and implement a system that will manage the reports within an easy to use, yet powerful interface. It will alleviate the issue of switching between multiple technologies such as the currently used Google Drive and Microsoft Word. another resource the system will hopefully free up is the time of the LeTS team as each report will have a "track record" allowing the users to see, with ease, what has been done and what needs to be done according to the report itself. It will also be able to "chase up" those who have not fulfilled their required tasks by a certain date which again allows LeTS to concentrate on other jobs.