How can students help improve the quality of education? Completing surveys from the Board of Studies is a start, says master’s student Marcel Brouwers.
Marcel Brouwers: “If a lot of people have the same complaint, even if it’s minor, then we can try to do something about it.” (Photo: Heather Montague)
“I first came to TU Delft to do a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and I am currently doing a master’s in Electrical Power Engineering. I’ve been here for almost five years now and I plan to finish my master’s in September.
I am a member of the Electrotechnische Vereeniging, which is the study association for Electrical Engineering students at TU Delft. I had been part of the evaluation committee for the study association, and they asked me if I was interested in participating in something related to education. I’ve always been really passionate about education so that’s how I got involved with the Board of Studies (BoS) for the Electrical Engineering programme.
The Board of Studies is a supervisory organ within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science that consists of both student members and Faculty members so it’s a joint venture in that sense. Our main responsibility is trying to ensure the quality of education. We try to maintain or improve the quality of education however that might be possible.
We do surveys with students twice a quarter. There is one at the start of a quarter which is usually an evaluation of the previous quarter and first impressions of the current quarter. Then usually towards the end of the quarter, after exams, there is another one. There are various things that come out of surveys. Some things can be very minor. For example, during Covid times, sometimes the recordings of courses were bad or the audio quality was poor. Sometimes we also learn about courses that get bad evaluations and then we try to get involved to improve those as well. We want to know the main things that students are dissatisfied with and find out what can be done about it. We try to collect that kind of feedback in a structured manner and see if we can give advice to the Director of Studies about what can be done to improve things.
‘I have ambitions to do something related to education in the future’
The quality of our education is measured through how the students experience it. At the moment the response rate to our surveys is not the best. I think a lot of students don’t really know who we are and what we do so we hope that will change. With the surveys, getting feedback is really important for us to be able to pinpoint if something is going wrong. If a lot of people have the same complaint, even if it’s minor, then we can try to do something about it. What we want students to know is that they can always email the BoS and we will do our best to continue ensuring a high quality of education.
Participating as a student member on the BoS has been a good experience for me. I hope to do a PhD once I finish my master’s and I have ambitions to do something related to education in the future.”
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Heather Montague / Freelance writer
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