Teaching : how to ensure quality teaching, and how to recognize teaching qualifications

Abstract

Measuring teaching quality is challenging to say the least. Each instructor brings his/her training, experience, style, and capabilities to the classroom, making it notoriously difficult to establish a fair teaching quality metric. Commonly used metrics such as student evaluations are one-dimensional and cannot possibly capture all teaching quality elements. A better technique would identify each instructor's strengths on teaching-related activities, as well as places for improvement. While a perfect system may never be found, we present some guidance to broaden our understanding of teaching quality based on an application of service dominant logic and the joint co-creation of value between student and instructor. We also present one attempt to implement a framework, the Danish National Framework for Recognition of Teaching Qualifications, which provides a set of criteria that constitute quality teaching and can be used for assessing teaching qualifications.