Rush to expand led Thames Valley to neglect 'detail'

Quality watchdogs have criticised Thames Valley University's handling of open learning courses overseas.

Some programmes run by the university in collaboration with overseas partners suffered from a lack of preparation and attention to detail, according to a report from the Higher Education Quality Council.

Efforts to expand collaborative activities rapidly and secure agreements with institutions abroad quickly led to neglect of validation procedures, the report suggests.

The usual two-stage validation process was sometimes "conflated into one event", and in one case "there appeared to have been no institutional validation other than by the recommendation of an individual member of the university's staff and a reference obtained from another UK institution of higher education," it says.

The university ran into difficulties over programmes run in Taiwan. It was forced to suspend them because the student's results were so bad. The HEQC found that in preparing courses "there had been insufficient recognition of the changes needed to cope with the very limited usage in Taiwan of English in business contexts".

The university also paid insufficient attention to detail in its preparation for courses run in conjunction with the University of National and World Economics in Bulgaria, the report says.

Susanne Hazelgrove, Thames Valley University pro vice chancellor, said the university was already addressing the problems when the HEQC audit was carried out. "We have addressed the issues in those areas where we perceived there were weaknesses," she said.