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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
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21 September 2021

The Faculty of Medicine, University of Ruhuna, established a system to obtain SET at the
departmental level and monitor the process centrally, through the IQAC. Although obtaining SET has

been practiced in the faculty at the departmental level, the process has not been centralized and

monitored before 2020. IQAC has recognized that SET has not been conducted regularly and
effectively across the departments. In some departments even though SET was conducted, analysis has

not been done due to constraints in the human resources. There was no mechanism to ensure whether
any measures were taken to rectify the gaps identified through SET. Therefore, IQAC took a step

forward to centralize and streamline the SET process. The aim of this concept paper is to describe the
process of obtaining and monitoring SET developed for the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ruhuna

as a good practice in quality assurance.

Methodology

A workshop for non-academic staff members was conducted to train them in obtaining online

feedback. At least one non-academic member from each department participated in the workshop.
They acquired skills in taking a copy from the original Google form, individualizing the form for a

given session, acquisition of responses, extracting necessary information and preparing the report on

students’ feedback. All the academics of the 15 departments in the faculty were encouraged to conduct
one SET per year. They were given the option to conduct either through hard copies or Google forms.

Obtaining SET was done at the department level. In 2020, the progress of obtaining SET was assessed
at mid and end of the year by IQAC.

The SET used in the faculty was developed by the Medical Education and Staff Development Unit of
the Faculty of Medicine. It consists of ten 5-Likert scale questions and two open-ended questions

which focus on the introduction, objectives, and summary of the lecture; audibility and speed of the
lecture; whether the concepts were explained clearly; whether the teacher is prepared for the lecture;

clarity of the slides/graphs/diagrams; overall quality of the lecture, and whether the student can apply
what was learnt during the session. The two open-ended questions are for students to indicate good

points regarding the session and suggestions for improvements.

Due to restrictions implied during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual teaching was introduced and was the

main mode of delivering lectures. IQAC found that the tool used for physical teaching sessions would
not address comprehensively to improve the teaching conducted via the virtual platform. Therefore, a

questionnaire was developed to obtain feedback for virtual teaching which was approved at the IQAC

meeting.

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