Applying Standards to Tertiary-Level History: Policy, Challenges and the After Standards Project

Learning outcomes assessment and History: TEQSA, the After Standards Project and the QA/QI challenge in Australia

“…The short-sighted abolition of the ALTC by the Commonwealth Government in early 2011 undermined both the LTAS project and the disciplinary-driven approach to teaching and learning standards. The efficacy of a discipline approach was questioned and TEQSA’s interim chair (Denise Bradley) reportedly questioned the validity of the approach (Brawley et al, 2011: 181). Her views were supported by the ‘Group of Eight’ (Go8) research-intensive universities.…”

“…This article introduces the efforts of one discipline community in Australia – History – to come to terms with this emerging environment and the new demands around compliance and accountability. In 2011 all history departments in Australia gave their support to a project funded by the former Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC, parts of which have subsequently been resurrected within the national bureaucracy as the Office of Learning and Teaching) that set out to educate and empower the discipline to act as a united community and assert ownership of a standards process (Brawley et al, 2011). The ‘After Standards Project’ (2011) is moving into its second year and is now facing the challenges associated with designing and trialing a disciplinary learning outcomes assessment methodology and process.…”

Tuning history

“…This was also apparent in the UK’s analogous efforts in the late 1990s to establish clear learning outcomes in the introduction of its History Benchmark Statement for undergraduate programmes in 2000, now twice revised (Booth, 2010). In Australia, historians faced similar difficult choices, in the end formulating discipline standards influenced by yet outside of Tuning which reflected both the diversity and commonality of practice in their national discipline community (Brawley et al., 2011). In all efforts to establish discipline-wide standards, there have been disagreements, resistances and the (eventual) forging of consensus.…”