Glossary > Quality Assurance Officer

The Quality Assurance component of the Subject Outlines tool (which utilises the ‘QA Officer’ [QAO] role) was created to support Faculty processes which uphold their Outline QA policy. Note that a policy for assuring the quality of Outlines has been delegated to the Faculties by Senate. This inherently includes the level of Outline quality expected for subjects taught by the Faculty and/or some explanation of how the Faculty defines the term 'quality assurance' in the context of Subject Outlines.

If Faculty policy requires Outlines to be peer reviewed, the School must assign the peer/s responsible to the Quality Assurance Officer (QAO) role for each subject via the Subject Coordinator Maintenance Form. Alternatively, the SCMF 'bulk add' feature allows a staff member to be added as a QA Officer for all subjects taught by the School - the cohorts for which each staff member is responsible for reviewing must then be clearly communicated to relevant parties.

Bear in mind that only one (1) QAO can perform QA at any one time and only one (1) QAO needs to QA approve an Outline. However team quality assurance can be performed in sequence by utilising the Change QAO function available to the current QAO within the Roles pop-up box.

A potential QAO becomes the current QAO by either:

▪	being the first QAO to add a comment or complete QA; or

▪	having the current QAO role handed over to them by the QAO who previously possessed QA permissions.

Until any QAO adds a comment or completes QA, all QAOs are able to enter the Outline QA screen. All QAOs have the ability to enter the View screen to peruse an Outline and view any QA comments regardless of whether they hold the current or potential QAO role.

Note that if Faculty policy considers self-proofing to be acceptable in assuring the quality of an Outline, the Author is able to be added into the QA Officer role to progress the Outline through the QA component of the Subject Outline tool.

The QA Officer has the ability to:

▪	provide the Author with general comments on the Outline or note comments against specific sections of the Outline.

▪	approve the Outline by marking it as 'Ready to Publish' which will trigger overnight publication from 28 days prior to session.

▪	request that the Author make revisions prior to its publication to students.

▪	opt to ‘pre-approved QA’ of the required revisions to enable the Author to trigger the Ready to Publish process without requiring further QA of Outline.

To learn more about the functionality available to a QA Officer when performing a QA review on an Outline see QA Outline.To learn more see Your 'Quality Assurance' List and Change QAO.

To summarise key points:

▪	it is the responsibility of each Faculty to determine, communicate and manage how Outlines must be quality assured; and

▪	the Subject Outlines tool does not prescribe a quality assurance process – however the QAO role and QA component are designed to support/enable a QA Officer to uphold the Faculty’s Outline quality assurance policy within the Subject Outlines tool itself.

▪	Schools are requested to populate and maintain the new QA Officer (QAO) role as required by the Faculty policy for assuring the quality of Outlines.

How does an Outline becomes accessible to the QA Officer for QA?

Once the Author deems the Outline as being Ready for QA and the Outline passes a Compliance Check, it becomes available to QA Officer/s to perform a quality assurance review on the Outline. There may be multiple potential QAOs for any subject - however only one (1) QAO can perform QA on the Outline at any given time. You are able to click on the Roles icon to see the names of any other QAOs. The current QAO has the ability to handover their permissions to another potential QAO.

To learn more about the overall process, see the Outline Development Process.