On 18 October, 2018, the Open University of China (OUC) held a meeting concerning a pilot survey of graduate and employer satisfaction in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. More than 30 people, including Lin Yu, vice president of the OUC, Ye Hong, president of Zhejiang Radio and TV University (Zhejiang RTVU), and directors and other personnel from 11 branches, such as the Tianjin Branch and the OUC Experimental School, attended the meeting.

Han Yi, director of the OUC Quality Monitoring and Evaluation Centre, summarised the work. According to her, student and employer satisfaction is an important measure of learner development at the university. The Ministry of Education has initiated an annual report on the development of continuing education, and the OUC has surveyed student and employer satisfaction in order to enhance the evaluation of it and provide a reflection of the quality of training at the OUC. She covered four aspects: implementation of the survey, its results, existing problems, and ideas for the future.

Twelve units introduced the organisation and implementation of the survey, discussed problems with implementing it, made suggestions for future work, and affirmed its significance. 66.7% of the units were shown to have analysed their own data, and 28.6% to have used the results of the questionnaire to enhance teaching. During the meeting, participants also looked over archival satisfaction surveys for Zhejiang RTVU.

Lin Yu summed up the results of the meeting as follows. First, quality and service need to improve, which will require the collaboration of the teaching and quality-management departments and consideration of how best to serve the OUC system. Second, the design and reliability of the survey should be enhanced, as well as the ease of conducting it. The indicators relating to serving students also need to be supplemented and improved into the satisfaction indicators. The survey should be easy for students to take. Third, the survey should be used to enhance the operations of the university without putting a greater burden on staff. He pointed out that inevitably a number of issues need to be dealt with at this stage of the survey.

By Luan Bin,OUC