Update August 2004
During the summer of 2004, the Agency carried out a survey, through the liaison role in Wales, England and Northern Ireland, of the purpose and use of programme specifications.
The Agency received a very encouraging response, with the majority providing thoughtful and detailed comments as well as answers to the questions asked.
The detailed nature of the responses indicate a wealth of information that the Agency now wishes to analyse with a view to deciding on any future work in this area that might be helpful to the sector. For example, many responses indicated that the examples provided in the Guidelines for programme specifications, published in 2000, while useful at the time, are now out of date and that a refreshed selection of up to date exemplars would be useful.
The outcomes of the analysis will be available in the late autumn and will be published on the Agency’s web site.
Request for information on programme specifications - April 2004
The design and role of programme specifications has been raised at a number of liaison visits and we are interested in getting a picture of how programme specifications are used throughout the sector. Our intention at this stage is to get an overall view of their purpose and use by asking you to answer the following questions briefly by e-mail; we then hope to follow this up at a later stage with a more detailed agenda based on the information that we receive from this initial survey.
The specific questions are:
- Who is the target audience for programme specifications at your institution?
- Do you find that the structure and content of your programme specifications meet the needs of the target audience?
- Has the use of programme specifications changed at your institution over time?
- Were/are the examples in the current Guidelines useful in developing programme specifications?
- Have you ever done, or are you doing any evaluation work with students to find out their views on programme specifications?
- Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about programme specifications?
The outcome of this work will be a brief report which we will publish on our web site in August 2004.
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