Quality in teaching

BFH is an educational institution with the aim of training highly qualified specialists and managers and enabling them to take on responsible tasks in business, culture and society. This requires teaching of the highest quality, both professionally and didactically, which enables students to make an active contribution to social transformation during and after their studies. The steady increase in the number of students (incl. EHSM) over the last few years is an indicator of the attractiveness, the good quality of teaching and the level of awareness of BFH and thus also of its impact on the economy, on culture and society.

In order to ensure high quality in teaching and to optimise it on an ongoing basis, BFH uses various evaluation measures. Among other things, it conducts annual web-based surveys among current and former students. The results of the 2021 student and alumni survey were very positive and better than in previous years. The vast majority of the more than 1000 current and former students who took part in the survey would recommend BFH to others. In particular, the professional competence of the lecturers and their own increase in knowledge were rated very highly by the participants. More than four fifths of the graduates found a job with a BFH qualification within four months, which brings the value back to pre-Corona levels.

With the ‘Teaching Guidelines’ and the ‘Strategy for Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age’, new future-oriented quality standards were defined by the Vice President’s Office for Teaching in the year under review. These required a fundamental readjustment of the guidelines and questionnaire for the evaluation of courses. The new guidelines are characterised in particular by a stronger impact orientation of the evaluation process and a clear positioning of quality responsibility as a management task. Binding threshold values for quality criteria are recommended.

The understanding of good teaching at the BFH is based on the ‘Teaching Guidelines’ and the ‘Teaching and Learning Strategy for the Digital Age 2020 - 2024’. The Teaching Committee and the Quality Development Committee are responsible for quality assurance at the level of the university as a whole. The further development of the curricula is driven by developments in the disciplines and the professional fields and happens within the departments. Every degree programme at BFH is evaluated in a process that is repeated every seven years and involves both internal and external stakeholders.

The central element of good teaching is the didactic competence of the teaching staff. With the Virtual Academy (formerly the University Didactics & E-Learning Unit), BFH has a competence centre that advises, coaches and trains lecturers and mid-level teaching staff in this regard. Staff whose main activity is teaching must have a certificate in university didactics.

Through offers such as ‘BFH diagonal’, practical modules, additional certificates such as the Certificate of Global Competence and the Certificate of Engagement in Sustainability, stays abroad and various departmental offers, BFH ensures that its graduates can also acquire interdisciplinary competences in addition to the relevant subject-specific competences. This creates good conditions for BFH graduates to make a positive contribution to the economy, society and the environment.

An essential component of quality management in teaching is the evaluation of courses and degree programmes. The review of the methodological-didactic and subject-specific quality of teaching is carried out annually and on the basis of closed PDCA cycles. These are highly professionalised and standardised. In addition, overarching holistic assessments of the developmental status of the university and its departments are carried out as part of four-year EFQM assessments and during institutional accreditations.