Ecological Teaching Evaluation vs the Datafication of Quality: Understanding Education with, and Around, Data

Current evaluation of higher education programmes is driven primarily by economic concerns, with a resulting imbalance towards the summative assessment of teaching and away from faculty development. These agendas are advanced through datafication, in which the transformation of social and material activity into digital data is producing a narrow, instrumental view of education. Taking a postdigital perspective on contemporary practices of evaluation outlined in higher education literature, we argue for an ecological view, in which evaluation must take account of those aspects of teaching, learning, and educational context, missing from digital data. We position quality as distributed across teacher, student, institution and context, arguing for the cross-fertilization of diverse kinds of data and non-datafied understandings, along with greater involvement of teachers and students in ways that enhance their agency, and develop their evaluative judgement of the quality of educational practices. We conclude that datafied practices can complement expert judgement when situated within a trusting, formative environment, and informed by an understanding of both pedagogy and technology, and clarity of educational purpose.