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The purpose of ITLR

Overall aims and objectives

How it'll work in practice

How ITLR 2023 is different

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The purpose of ITLR is:

• To ensure our education remains high quality and continues to improve. This exercise is one of many we use to evaluate and enhance the student experience. Others you may be familiar with are collection of feedback from students, External Examiners and employers and our annual conversations with academic departments to reflect on the next steps for improving education quality through Teaching Excellence Group (TEG) meetings.

• To complement these tools, we periodically undertake a thorough review – the Institutional Teaching and Learning Review (ITLR) – with academic departments and relevant professional services to evaluate how effectively quality is assured and how the student learning experience could be further enhanced. This happens every five years. Ordinarily we would have scheduled ITLR to take place in 2022, however due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Senate agreed to postpone the exercise until 2023.

• This is our third iteration of ITLR and we are making the purpose bolder. To complement the conversations that will come through departmental reviews, we are designing ITLR as a catalyst for connection and collaboration between departments across the whole University. The Covid-19 pandemic brought significant disruption to our education community, and we will use ITLR to move forward from this by ensuring it truly represents an institutional space to discuss the future of teaching and learning at Warwick, not just a series of departmental reviews. From this, we will form the University’s next Education Strategy and inspire the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to achieve our ambitions.

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The ITLR will provide a structured, supported process to identify and evaluate the opportunities for strategically enhancing the quality of education, student experience and student support in each department over the following years – informed in part by a thorough assessment of current provision and any risks to academic quality and standards.

As such, the ITLR will enable:

• Our plans for enhancing education at Warwick in the coming years to be based on a coherent and comprehensive assessment of our recent progress, current position and future opportunities that has drawn in a wide range of staff, student and stakeholder voices. This will inform and drive our strategic intent and enhancements going forward.

•  Us to have created new connections and conversations across academic departments and faculties around common areas of interest that are catalysts for future collaboration.

• Us to be able to provide continued assurance to our students, the University's Council and our regulator – the Office for Students – that we continue to secure academic standards, deliver high-quality education and address weaknesses or risks identified. 

Through the ITLR we will deliver:

• An objective assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of our educational provision in each of our academic departments, including external verification by subject experts.

• An objective assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the support of our student-facing professional services for a high-quality student learning experience, including external verification by subject experts.

• Identification of weaknesses in and risks to academic quality and standards and the actions needed to address these robustly.

• A comprehensive view of the gains and good practices established in recent years so that we can celebrate, share and embed these more widely.

• An assessment of progress towards the University’s 2018 Education Strategy and its supporting plans.

• Thematic analyses of the review findings across academic departments to inform the work of central professional services and the development of the University’s next Education Strategy.

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As a quality assurance and enhancement (or continuous improvement) exercise, ITLR will use a structured and supported review process for each department and professional service team in scope to assure quality, to identify risks to standards, and to evaluate opportunities for strategically enhancing the quality of education, the student learning experience and student support.

To do so, departments will undergo reviews which will feature:

• a general evaluation

• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis

• an assessment of how effective quality assurance, governance and leadership are

• an evaluation of a small number of common themes, which are interdisciplinary learning, blended learning, and education for sustainable development

• a specific evaluation of a theme determined by the department.

The format of reviews will include:

• a self-evaluation document
• the appointment of a panel of staff, students, and external experts
• online and in-person meetings between the panel, the department and stakeholders
• a panel report to inform the department's future development

• the Practical Arrangements section of our website further explains all aspects of the review

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