Developing International Academic Moderators

The aim of the project was to develop new academic roles within the Division of Business, Enterprise and Management at Queen Margaret University to reduce the workload of academic staff based in Edinburgh who were heavily involved in module delivery in international partnerships. The main objective was to develop new roles focused solely on the moderation of student work across a range of programmes in several different countries. What developed rapidly was a system that provided a faster service to partners and their students from the ‘home’ institution. A Moderator template was constructed that could be utilised across any module being reviewed by the team. This provided greater clarity on decision making, transparency, consistency and opportunities for two way communication between partnership teaching teams and the home institution. Early feedback suggests that the students appreciate quicker response time on marks and feedback. Staff like greater communications and praise received from external examiners who find the process easier to understand and it clarifies why certain decisions were made by markers. The project has freed up academics who were previously feeling overburdened by excessive moderation requests and now have the opportunity to focus on other areas of interest to them, for example, research, knowledge exchange etc. In future we anticipate the recruitment of at least one more moderator in the coming academic term.