An application of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Approach.
Higher education has been globally driven by some forces such as increasing global competition and the struggle for survival, increasing costs, demand for accountability and rising customer expectation about quality, rapidly changing technology, and accountability by accrediting associations, funding agencies and the public. Also, there is a growing International competition with regards to students’ enrolment, faculty expertise, and research achievement. With all these pressures, there is a need to consider the position of performance evaluation system for academic staff in higher institutions of learning.
The standards used in evaluating the lecturers in Nigerian tertiary institutions to day have failed to enhance the quality of performance and credibility of these educators because such standards tend to give low priority to teaching.
Teacher evaluation is a vital part of the educational process, yet there is no consensus on the best way to it. Most education professionals would agree, however, that since many important decisions are made on the basis of information gathered in the evaluation process, it is crucial that the instruments used be both valid and reliable. It involves a systematic gathering and analysis of information, on the basis of which decisions are taken regarding the effectiveness, efficiency and/or competence of the teacher in realizing set professional goals and the desire of the school to promote effective learning.
However, there are some challenges to meeting these requirements:
- The cost of writing, distribution, collecting of the questioner to be analysis is great and time consuming.
- The manual method of carry out academic staff evaluation performance by filling questioners and analyzing of the questioners is very cumbersome and time consuming
- The inability of stakeholders in education to evaluate the standard of classroom teaching has contributed to the falling standard of education in Nigeria.
The project seeks to develop academic staff performance evaluation software system that has standard computerized functions for routine monitoring of lecturers performance in Nigerian universities.
Informal student evaluation of teachers began as early as the fifteenth century, when students at the University of Bologna paid instructors according to their teaching abilities.
The proposed system is an automated system where individual subjective opinions of evaluators (students and staff) are collected through an inexpensive electronic questionnaire, validated, aggregated and scientifically converted to a representative, objective result reflective of reality.
The scientific process here involves the application of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Approach.
- Provides effective and efficient system for evaluation of academic staff performance.
- Provide a real time access to administrators the performance of their academic staff.
- To compare the efficiency between the proposed system and the manual system
- Help in rating of academic staff and giving of promotion at due time without unbiased or favoritism.
- Use the system as a benchmark for research purposes
- This work will be most important to Nigeria University Commission (NUC) for evaluation of lecturer in Nigeria University
- Promotion is a way of appreciating someone's effort in job places and also motivate him\her to put more effort, a system of evaluating lecturer's performance and grading him/her for promotion will encourage the lecturer to put more effort in delivering their course outline and to have a cordial relationship with the students.
- The system will help lecturer to get their promotion when due.
- Students will benefit when lecturer deliver his\her lesson very well in such a way that the students will have good performance in their examinations.
- The society will benefit from the quality of good students produces by quality lecturer.
The study is limited to the Faculty of Physical Science University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), though other department faculty and tertiary institutions in the country can adopt it for evaluation of their respective academic staff.
- Umaru Adamu (M.Sc, Computer Science, University of Nigeria Nsukka)
- Nwobodo Chukwuemeka (B.Sc, Computer Science '017, University of Nigeria Nsukka)