Data driven quality in higher education

Data is a corner stone of quality. Higher Education Organizations have within their structure different sets of databases covering in some cases decades that can serve the organization to optimize their quality programs. The Faculty of Pharmacy of University of Lisbon in presently implementing a quality management system that make use of existing databases sets gathered over time to address different organization goals (e.g. accounting, student management, outcomes,…). The integration of the existing databases is enabling the quality program being setup to pinpoint improvement objectives and supporting their follow-up. The use of data visualization tools like Tableau Public, Gephy or Vosviewer has enable to use different data sets in a dynamic environment to simulate and analyze quality challenges throughout organization. Data mining and data polishing has been mostly performed with a help of excel. The main issues that have been identify until this point are corrupt or inconsistent data, older data are still in analogic support, different software platforms without a common export file type. Long-term data series are promising datasets for quality improvement especially if one makes use of data visualization.

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Data visualization; Higher education; Quality improvement; Quality management