Are we serious about enhancing courses? Using the principles of assessment for learning to enhance course evaluation

A series of workshops with educators at Birmingham City University about enhancing student involvement in course evaluation prompted us to consider the principles of assessment for learning as an approach to enhancing the quality and value of this evaluative activity. We focus on student enhanced learning through effective feedback which is a model designed to support the integration of ‘feedback’ and ‘feed-forward’ as a social practice in higher education. In the same way that dialogue between student and educator is now viewed as an essential part of student development we suggest that this approach should apply equally to the development of courses. In this paper we outline the principles of the model – reflection, transparency and developmental dialogue, and set out the case for using the approach to facilitate greater collaboration between students and educators to create a framework to facilitate shared ownership of course enhancement.