Benchmarking

Benchmarking is methodology used to improve performance by finding high-performing organizations and importing their practices to the home organization (Keehly, Abercrombie, 2008). Nowadays, when we define quality as a “moving target” that should be monitored and improved daily and when we have tools to create a highly interactive network of veterinary educators, solution-driven benchmarking is the method of choice. The essence of the method is the network of professionals and organizations that the benchmarker can tap for promising practices.

Five Steps of the Solution-Driven Benchmarking Method are:
 * 1) Discover the challenge
 * 2) Establish criteria for solution
 * 3) Search promising practices
 * 4) Implement promising practices
 * 5) Monitor progress

Networks and community of practice created/supported by Moodle community hubs and Mahara can significantly ease and accelerate the benchmarking process.

Sloan Consortium is an organization we can use as a benchmark and its Effective Practices Site is a good example we can import in the veterinary education community.

Sloan Consortium Effective Practices Site is available at: sloanconsortium.org/effective.

Universitas 21. Another good benchmark partner may be Universitas 21. It is an international network of 21 leading research-intensive universities in 13 countries (650,000 students, more than 130,000 staff members and more than 2 million alumni). Sharing good practice and benchmarking activity is one of the key goals of its strategic plan (2007-2012) http://www.universitas21.com/StrategicPlan.pdf.

Peer-reviews (accuracy) and feedback generated by students (ease of use and understanding) can play significant roles both in continuous quality improvement and in benchmarking (Bernardo, 2007). Both peer –review and feedback generated by students provide very valuable information. Because these are two different types of information, it is better to use both instead of relying  on one type.

Moodle Comments Block. In addition to the Community Hub  Framework, new Moodle 2.0 comes with a Comments Block. The comments block  allows comments to be added to any page and any activity. Comments can be  public or visible just to teachers (and/or administrators). With that feature  each user can become a reviewer; each user can add value to a course. Figure 5. Moodle Comments Block