A Software System in Support of Quality of Degree Programmes

Gennaro Costagliola, Mattia De Rosa, Vittorio Fuccella and Alessandro Ricchiuti

Department of Informatics, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 80084 Fisciano (SA), Italy

Keywords:

Quality in Education, Processes, Teaching evaluation, Alfresco.

Abstract:

We present a software system aimed at providing support to the management of processes for the self-

evaluation of the quality of degree programmes. The system was developed for quality management at the

University of Salerno, Italy. Its main functionalities include: monitoring of the process status, scheduling of

meetings, document management, support for working groups. With the help of some screenshots, the main

features will be described in the context of scenarios that commonly arise in the management of processes of

self-assessment of quality.

1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the evaluation of the quality of the

services of Italian universities has gained an increas-

ingly important role, also in determining the amount

of fundings to assign to each institution. Currently,

quality management only relies on the work of in-

ternal organizational structures, established for this

purpose. Such structures adopt a speciﬁc system for

quality management, used for the evaluation of the

different services, such as administrative procedures,

education, services to students and employees, eco-

nomic management and so on. The most careful qual-

ity managers also took this opportunity to deﬁne qual-

ity management systems to be certiﬁed according to a

standard (ISO, IEC, etc.).

Quality has been investigated in many aspects of

e-learning (Ehlers et al., 2004; Costagliola et al.,

2008; Costagliola et al., 2010). To achieve the de-

sired result more efﬁciently, the organization’s ap-

proach to quality should be based on processes (Proto

et al., 2010). The adoption of a carefully deﬁned

and constantly improved Quality Management Sys-

tems (QMSs) brings undeniable beneﬁts both within

the institution and in external relations. Although

these systems can be inspired to similar ones used in

other government institutions, universities provide a

particular service that not all governmental structures

include among the services offered to citizens: teach-

ing. The social role played by teaching is among the

most important elements contributing to the education

of future generations.

Recently, university education has been repeat-

edly reformed by Italian governments. Among these

reforms we must mention that of 1999

, which intro-

duced autonomy (economic and decisional) of indi-

vidual institutions, set the duration of the degree pro-

grammes (3 + 2 years), and established provisions for

the adaptation of Italian Universities to the European

level, which started with the ”Bologna Process”. Sub-

sequent amendments were made in 2004

and a new

reform came into force in 2010

. Each of these leg-

islative measures, changed the structure of curricula.

Teaching was massively involved, especially in the as-

pect of quality. Students had to change their curricula

several times, having to juggle among different degree

and examination titles.

The integrated AVA (Self Assessment, Periodic

Evaluation, Accreditation) system was introduced by

ANVUR

(National Rating Agency for the Evalua-

tion of University System and Research) to ensure the

quality of the courses in Italian universities. More in-

formation on this system will be given in next section.

In this context the need arose for referring to a

national uniﬁed system for the quality management

of degree programmes. Periodically evaluating a de-

gree programme is crucial to prevent the occurrence

of abnormal situations, which may compromise ed-

ucational and related activities. To avoid the occur-

rence of such situations, we propose a software sys-

tem aimed at providing support to the management

http://www.miur.it/0006Menu C/0012Docume/0098

Normat/2088Regola.htm

http://www.miur.it/0006Menu C/0012Docume/0098

Normat/4640Modiﬁ cf2.htm

http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/10240l.htm

http://www.anvur.org/

Costagliola, G., Rosa, M., Fuccella, V. and Ricchiuti, A.

A Software System in Support of Quality of Degree Programmes.

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2016) - Volume 1, pages 413-420

ISBN: 978-989-758-179-3

413

of processes for the self-evaluation of the quality of

degree programmes. This software is targeted to the

personnel involved in the quality system, i.e. the

heads of organizational structures within the degree

programmes, which are assigned the tasks deﬁned for

the processes. Among the requirements of the system

we have identiﬁed the following:

• Constant monitoring of processes by the con-

cerned people;

• Scheduling of meetings and communication to the

concerned people;

• Delivery (e.g., by e-mail) of any type of document

related to the processes and management of noti-

ﬁcations of document events;

• Appointment of working groups in a simple and

intuitive way;

• Access from any terminal equipped with a Web

browser, without any additional software or plug-

in.

The use of the proposed system, would provide sev-

eral advantages in the quality management process for

the degree programme. Firstly, the manual manage-

ment of processes will no longer be necessary, sav-

ing time and resources and avoiding the occurrence

of human errors. The documents would be kept in

the system, cataloged according to established rules

and protected from unauthorized access and modiﬁ-

cation. Document search would be facilitated, ensur-

ing a faster and more accurate access to information.

Lastly, in case of inspection, it would still be advanta-

geous to have a software system providing a summary

of the status of all the activities.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the

next section contains some background information,

especially regarding the legislation in force and the in-

ternal organization of the University of Salerno; Sec-

tion 3 describes the software system; its implementa-

tion is described in Section 4, together with some ex-

amples of uses; lastly, some ﬁnal remarks and a brief

discussion on future work conclude the paper.

2 BACKGROUND

This section describes how the University of Salerno

has implemented the provisions of the Regulations is-

sued by the national agency for the evaluation of the

quality of educational programs.

2.1 The AVA System

The integrated AVA system, that Italian universities

are adopting since 2013, is the means through which

ANVUR implemented the provisions of Law no. 240

of 2010 and the Legislative Decree n. 19 of 2012.

Through the AVA system, ANVUR pursuits the

objective of progressively addressing universities to-

wards autonomy of accountability and evaluation. In

particular, the Agency, after ﬁxing criteria, parame-

ters and indicators, veriﬁes their presence for initial

and recurrent accreditation, as well as for the purpose

of annually allocating funds and resources to univer-

sities.

The structure and characteristics of the AVA sys-

tem are primarily derived by both national laws

and guidelines issued and approved by European

ministers at the Bergen conference in 2005

, and

reported in European Standard guidelines (ESG-

ENQA). These guidelines were adopted in the Rec-

ommendation of the European Parliament and Coun-

cil (2006/143/CE). In particular, the structure of the

AVA system is described in detail in a document is-

sued by the executive board of ANVUR in July 2012

2.2 The Annual Evaluation Form

The rules of AVA system were implemented by the

University of Salerno through the establishment of the

Center for Quality (CQA), which adopted a system of

quality management based on processes. Each pro-

cess is aimed at managing a particular aspect of a de-

gree programme.

The CQA supervised (this task is now up to an-

other structure, called PQA, with similar responsibil-

ities) the production of the Annual Evaluation Form

(AEF). The AEF must be completed for each indi-

vidual Degree Programme (DP) and submitted to the

Ministry of Education every year by June 30, and con-

stitutes a functional tool for the design, construction,

self-evaluation and possible re-design of a DP. The

adoption of the AEF is a requirement to ensure the

quality of education.

The AEF is composed of two sections: the for-

mer section, ”Administration”, includes information

about the educational offer and the organization of the

DP, while the second section, ”Quality”, describes the

objectives, implementation mechanisms, results, and

information on the adopted organization and quality

management.

The compilation of the AEF is carried out under

the responsibility of the chair of the Teaching Coun-

cil (TC), in accordance with the procedures deﬁned

by internal rules of the university and the statements

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?

uri=OJ:L:2006:064:0060:0062:IT:PDF

http://www.anvur.org/attachments/article/26/ava docu

mentoﬁnale 0.pdf

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

414

of ANVUR. In particular, these rules specify a precise

sequence of steps and deadlines to be observed for

the processing of documents and records. To ensure

compliance with these constraints, the TC appoints

an internal organizational structure for quality assur-

ance, the Quality Assurance Self-assessment Group

(QA Group) and possibly, further commissions or del-

egates. This structure is responsible for the effective

fulﬁllment of the activities on the bases of criteria

such as: promptness in gathering the information; ef-

fectiveness and efﬁciency in processing solutions, in

the use of resources and in the implementation of ac-

tivities.

Together with the AEF, ANVUR requires the

completion of an Annual Review Report (ARR)

which contributes to the deﬁnition of the AEF, for the

”Quality” section. The ARR is the product of an audit

conducted annually with the aim of identifying spe-

ciﬁc conditions which negatively affect the validity of

a DP, including the proposal of appropriate solutions

to solve them.

According to the directives of ANVUR, AEF

and ARR constitute appropriate self-assessment doc-

uments for a DP. In particular, the AEF allows to ver-

ify the persistence of the necessary conditions for a

university to continue to offer a particular DP, while

the ARR is a useful tool in order to identify and solve

any critical situations for the DP, the effect of which

will then be assessed. The activities to be carried out

in the early stages of the preparation of ARR and,

consequently, the AEF, can be freely implemented by

universities. The preparation of the AEF and the ARR

sets up an instance of the so-called Deming Cycle or

PDCA Cycle (Johnson, 2002), which is a simple and

effective tool for quality. This cycle is composed of

four steps performed in a sequence:

1. planning what to do and how to do it;

2. realization of what was planned;

3. veriﬁcation of the results;

4. implementation of the necessary corrective ac-

tions.

Finally, the cycle is restarted.

The actions taken as a result of the evaluations

and recommendations made in the ARR of the pre-

vious years need to be assessed. This evaluation is

a duty of the working groups. Each Working Group

(WG) has the task of assessing the efﬁciency and ef-

fectiveness of a process, putting into practice what is

described in its deﬁnition. WGs produce, at the end of

the evaluation, the review report for the process, also

concerning the activities and the achievements. The

TC appoints a WG for each process. The composi-

tion of a WG varies: it may coincide with the chair of

the TC or may include individual teachers, commit-

tees (possibly integrated with students), administra-

tive staff, non-academic experts and representatives,

and so on. A WG may stay in charge for a ﬁxed pe-

riod of time, usually for the development of a speciﬁc

activity.

2.3 Processes for Quality Assurance

Self-assessment

The self-assessment of quality for the DP has been

entrusted to a system for quality management based

on processes. These processes were speciﬁcally de-

ﬁned by CQA and include a range of activities that

its WG has to perform, and then assess its results and

summarize them in a review report. The following

list shows the breakdown of processes in four macro-

processes. In parentheses we report the identiﬁer of

each element.

• Didactic planning (MP1)

– Deﬁnition of educational objectives and learn-

ing outcomes (DP Orientation) (MP1-P1)

– Educational design (academic regulations)

(MP1-P2)

– Consultation with stakeholders (MP1-P3)

• Orientation (incoming, ongoing) (MP2)

– Incoming orientation, (MP2-P1)

– Ongoing orientation, (MP2-P2)

• Monitoring and analysis (MP3)

– Annual Review (MP3-P1)

– Student progress monitoring (MP3-P2)

– Analysis of the satisfaction with the educa-

tional service (MP3-P3)

• Job placement (MP4)

– Job placement (MP4-P1)

Each process involves the TC that, in addition to ap-

pointing the WG should, in most cases, plan correc-

tive actions for the DP on the basis of the outcome

of the work of the WG. The Chair of the TC, instead,

performs tasks related to the publication of the works

outside of the organizational structure.

Figure 1 shows the form used to deﬁne a process.

Being a document for internal use, some parts can not

be reproduced and are omitted. The form is composed

of four parts. The ﬁrst part speciﬁes the name of the

process and the macro-process. The second part lists

all the documents related to the process divided into:

• Input documents;

• Partial and ﬁnal output documents;

A Software System in Support of Quality of Degree Programmes

415

Figure 1: Deﬁnition of the ”Consultation with stakeholders

(MP1-P3)” process.

• Documents for registration.

The registration documents include all meeting min-

utes produced during the process. The third part con-

tains the textual description of the commitments for

the process. For each of them, a manager is appointed.

The most common commitment is any meeting of the

WG or the TC, which should concern the aspects de-

scribed in the process deﬁnition. The commitments

for any process are always divided into three phases:

• Planning;

• Management and assessment;

• Reviewing of outcomes and communication.

The last section of the deﬁnition contains instead a

Gantt chart, showing the time and duration of the pro-

cess steps during the academic year.

In general, the processes are presented as in-

stances of a generic schema, which deﬁnes their struc-

ture and components (Figure 2). We can note from the

schema that phases are composed of separate commit-

ments (green), representing units of work to do for the

prosecution of the process.

3 THE SOFTWARE SYSTEM

In this section we describe the software system that

automates the processes described in the previous sec-

tion. The cited laws and regulations require that every

involved organizational entity should accomplish its

commitments, complying with the schedule and terms

Macro-process (MP1) Macro-process (MPn)

Process (P1) Process (Pn)

Input

documents

Output

documents

Documents

for registration

Phases

Planning

Management

& assessment

Reviewing of outcomes

and communication

Commitment

…

CommitmentCommitment

Figure 2: Generic schema of process deﬁnition.

imposed by the quality programming documentation.

Nevertheless, they do not describe “how” to perform

the planned tasks.

Without conditions or suggestions, every organi-

zational structure would organize autonomously: as-

pects like communication, development, registration

and storage of documents, information sharing, etc.,

would be left to the wisdom of the structure supervi-

sor. Nevertheless, every single subject, e.g. a WG

member or a quality manager, is a smaller part of

one single organization: the quality management sys-

tem. The achievement of the best level in internal ef-

ﬁciency of groups would not make sense when, at the

very end, it is impossible to put everything together

in a system that, for its nature, must be unique and

homogeneous. Using a metaphor, it would be like

if cells belonging to the same tissue, would produce

without any problem the same substance, but with a

different molecular structure.

Thus it is necessary to set a number of require-

ments for “quality in quality management”. Main-

taining a consistent structure to manage every elec-

tronic document, for example, could be a possible so-

lution to the problems related to registration, sharing

and storage of the documentation to develop or to use

whilst processes advance. Indexing of documents in

a single system would also allow users to search this

archive, rapidly accessing to any needed information.

If every user is registered to the system, he or she

could be directly and automatically informed anytime

about a meeting or appointed for a task. This will at

least partially solve the problems related to communi-

cation amongst quality management systems’ actors.

Since quality self-assessment processes are essen-

tially a set of commitments managed by the Chair of

the TC or by a WG supervisor, their status should be

known at any time either to the already cited subjects

as well to the AQ group Supervisor, who is responsi-

ble for the operation of the WGs.

The above requirements set the demand for a sys-

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

416

tem that could be helpful in the management of qual-

ity self-assessment processes, that deﬁnes common

procedures and ensures traceability for the performed

operations.

3.1 Main Functionalities

In the following sections, we describe the functional-

ities and the main characteristics of the system.

3.1.1 System Access

Any user has access to the system not only from

his/her own PC, but also from any computer running a

non-obsolete Web browser without any plugin or ex-

ternal software installed.

3.1.2 Process Management

The system allows the Chair of the TC to immediately

know the status of all processes, to check if some of

them requires a TC meeting. This functionality au-

tomates a very burdensome task: without the system,

the chair should manually check the process deﬁni-

tions, identify the active ones and later identify those

waiting for a TC meeting.

Furthermore, the system allows to start new pro-

cesses and tracking their status, provides all users

with the needed information (e.g., process status and

task list) for task completion, either at system access

or through email messages, as depicted in Figure 3.

tasklist:

task 2

status

quality management system CQA

task 1 task 2 task n

Web browser

status

Web browser

tasklist:

task 2

Figure 3: Schema of requesting process status and tasklist.

3.1.3 Meeting Planning

Each process requires the organization of meetings.

The supervisor of the WG should care about its plan-

ning. He or she has to choose a date, an hour, a place,

deﬁne the agenda and ﬁnally wrap all this information

in an email message, that has to be sent to all WG

members, for whom he or she had previously found

all email addresses. The system automates all of the

above duties, as schematized in Figure 4.

meeting

notification

Web browser

meeting

planning

quality

management

system CQA

member

supervisor

Figure 4: Schematics of a meeting planning with the sys-

tem.

3.1.4 Document Management

For each meeting held, the involved group draws a

meeting minute, containing important information for

the process. Frequently, the minutes are in a digital

format and the group supervisor saves them on his

own PC. In this case, there could be the risk of acci-

dental deletions, machine faults and difﬁcult retrieval

due to a non meaningful ﬁlename. Sharing the meet-

ing minutes is another topic to concern about. They

could be stored in an hosting service or sent by email

to all participants; in both cases, one would lose track

of the possessors of the copies as well as the sharing

link.

The system stores the documents related to a pro-

cess in dedicated spaces, with user-speciﬁc access

rights. Documents can be submitted through the Web

interface or as e-mail attachments. If stated in the pro-

cess deﬁnition, the Chair of the TC or the AQ group

Supervisor is informed of a document submission.

Lastly, since the self-assessment processes are sched-

uled yearly, the documents are classiﬁed by the aca-

demic year they belong to. All the documents stored

in the system are indexed to enhance keyword search.

The schema in Figure 5 shows the above described

functionality.

Web browser

quality

management

system CQA

supervisor

meeting

minute

meeting

minute

document

submission

notification

AQ group

supervisor

Figure 5: Schema for the submission of a document.

3.1.5 Appointing Workgroups

Every process requires the TC to appoint WGs. The

system provides an on-line form to easily add users to

the process’ WG: notiﬁcation are automatically sent

to group members and supervisor, as depicted in Fig-

ure 6.

3.2 System Characterization

As evident from the functionalities described in the

previous subsection, the system is focused on pro-

A Software System in Support of Quality of Degree Programmes

417

appointment

notification

Web browser

WG ap-

pointment

quality

management

system CQA

member

chair

supervisor

appointment

notification

Figure 6: Schematic of workgroup nomination with the use

of the system.

cess and document management. The continuous im-

provement of processes and optimal use of resources

requires a circular model, where the process status

is constantly monitored and assessed through reports

that the organizational structures should draw.

This kind of system could be hence considered as

a Content Management System

(CMS), which can

manage big amounts of documents. For this particular

domain, the system so far described could be further

categorized as a CMS with Business Process Manage-

ment

(BPM) functionalities.

4 IMPLEMENTATION

This chapter presents the implementation of the sys-

tem. Here we describe the operations carried out for

the realization of the functionalities previously intro-

duced.

4.1 Criteria for the Development of the

System

The development of a system like the proposed one

may be complex and the product will be extremely

specialized on quality management of DPs. Neverthe-

less, there are software products for Enterprise Con-

tent Management (ECM) whose efﬁcacy and reliabil-

ity is proved. The choice of an ECM system should

focus on the ease with which the product ﬁts the fea-

tures of a quality management system.

Many Content Management software products are

proprietary and released under a commercial license.

Among these we can mention: ECM Documentum

the ECM suites from IBM

, and OpenText

. These

http://www.comentum.com/what-is-cms-content-

management-system.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business process manage

ment

http://www.emc.com/enterprise-content-management/

documentum-platform.htm

http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/category/

enterprise-content-management

http://www.opentext.com

products are indeed very complex and costly, suitable

for large industrial companies and often supplied in

ad-hoc solutions, offered with the integrated support

of the software house.

Considering the identiﬁed features, from an anal-

ysis of existing products, we narrowed our choice on

two of them: Microsoft SharePoint and Alfresco

The former is an Enterprise CMS, widely adopted in

the business domain; it provides many functionalities,

including: creation of websites for document shar-

ing, visualization of Web delivered contents, index-

ing, search and creation of intranet pages. The latter

has similar features and is widely spreading (Shariff,

2007), attracting the attention of many big organiza-

tions, some noteworthy like KLM, NASA, Michelin,

the New York Philharmonic and the Fox Broadcast-

ing Company

. Recently it has been placed in the

“visionary” section of the Magic Quadrant realized

from the consulting ﬁrm Gartner

and amongst the

Strong Performers in the last Forrester Research re-

port about ECM

We balanced the considerations on features with

the cost of the products. SharePoint 2013 Server has

both a paid and a freeware license. Unfortunately, the

latter is limited to basic services and is focused only

on Web Content Management. However, its main

drawback is its closed nature: almost all components

of SharePoint use proprietary standards that would re-

quire a steep learning curve or the acquisition of pro-

grammers already skilled in .NET technologies. Al-

fresco has an Open Source license and is based on

non-proprietary standards. For the above reasons, we

chose Alfresco for our system development.

4.2 System Development

The whole system is based on Alfresco; every devel-

oped module was added to it as an add-on or custom

conﬁguration of its features. Alfresco allows develop-

ers to act on its internal mechanisms at different lev-

els. In our implementation it is predominant the low-

est level (coding) approach, but some features were

developed using the user interface or the Administra-

tion console.

The process management provided by Alfresco is

essentially based on XML ﬁles that deﬁne processes

according to the BPMN notation (White, 2004). This

notation is then integrated with elements belonging

http://www.alfresco.com

http://www.alfresco.com/customers

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-

1KQF4YJ&ct=130924&st=sg

available previous registration at the page

http://www.alfresco.com/forrester

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

418

to XML namespace introduced by Activiti, the work-

ﬂow engine. These tools allow to create very com-

plex workﬂows. Each workﬂow is composed of a list

of concatenated elements, similarly to ﬂowcharts. An

element can be for example a task or a gateway; the

latter has the same function of a logic port. Figure 7

shows a BPMN representation of a process.

TC meeting

WG deﬁnition WG meeting TC meeting

Chair

Communication

Figure 7: BPMN representation of the process Deﬁnition of

learning objectives and learning outcomes (MP1-P1).

Activiti introduces the possibility to run speciﬁc

code in several points of the deﬁnition of the BPMN

workﬂow, e.g. at the creation or the completion of the

task. This code can be written in Java or JavaScript.

We chose the former, to exploit the advantages of us-

ing a compiled programming language: i.e. the use

of an IDE, the possibility of testing code through JU-

nit, the access to the whole API instead of the subset

available from JavaScript, the availability of a larger

number of free libraries.

The interface of Web Alfresco Share is fully im-

plemented through the Spring Surf framework. To

add a page to a site or to customize its appearance,

it is just needed to create or edit XML ﬁles. In our

system we speciﬁcally created a template for the sites

for process management. This model includes several

pages: the archive of documents, an internal wiki, a

calendar, a collection of useful URLs and page for

displaying the Gantt chart.

To receive and send e-mail messages, Alfresco

must have access to a mail server. We appropriately

set its conﬁguration to handle this function. We also

implemented a module to manage messages and send-

ing attachments and speciﬁcally designed templates

for e-mail messages.

4.3 Examples of Use

This subsection presents examples of system use.

With the help of some screenshots (in Italian), the

main features will be described in the context of sce-

narios that commonly arise in the management of pro-

cesses of self-assessment of quality.

Let us imagine a simple scenario where the

only active process is Consultation with stakehold-

ers (MP1-P3). The process has a dedicated home

page. As shown in Figure 8, it contains a customiz-

able control panel composed of dashlets. Common

dashlets include a calendar, a wiki and other useful

tools. Other web pages are reachable through the

main menu bar. These include the archive of docu-

ments, the Gantt diagram, etc.

Figure 8: Screenshot of a process home page.

By simply sending an e-mail to the system, the

Chair of the TC can know which process requires a

meeting of the TC, and possibly organize it. The sys-

tem replies with the mail shown in Figure 9 which

includes, besides the requested information on pro-

cesses’ state, a link to the meeting organization form

page. There (see Figure 10) it is possible to choose

date, hour, location and agenda of the meeting. Upon

form submission, the system sends an e-mail notiﬁ-

cation to all participants. An e-mail with a summary

of data is also sent to the Chair. Besides these in-

formation, the e-mail contains instructions on how to

archive the minutes of the meeting (see Figure 11).

This can be done by submitting it through a Web form

or by attaching it to an e-mail.

Figure 9: System e-mail sent to the Chair of the TC with

information about process states. It also includes a link to

the meeting organization form page.

5 DISCUSSION AND

CONCLUSIONS

We presented the design and implementation of a sys-

tem for the management of quality of educational pro-

grams in university. The system provides people in-

volved in the processes with an effective tool for the

A Software System in Support of Quality of Degree Programmes

419

Figure 10: Screenshot of the meeting organization form

page.

Figure 11: System e-mail sent to the Chair of the TC with

information about an organized meeting. It also includes a

details on how to archive the minutes of the meeting.

management of commitments assigned as well as for

keeping track of the process status in the management

of the quality of the degree programmes.

Since the identiﬁcation of requirements, the sys-

tem was characterized as a software for document

management. The choice of using Alfresco as a start-

ing point proved adequate, despite some difﬁculties

in the development. The identiﬁed functionalities

were obtained by extending and customizing the basic

functions of Alfresco, taking advantage of the oppor-

tunity to access source code. Moreover, the presence

of the Activiti engine for the execution of workﬂow,

made our system suitable to model the management

of quality.

At system login, the user is presented with a cus-

tomizable summary screen, which in most cases dis-

plays a list of tasks to be performed. Furthermore, all

meeting information (date, time, place and agenda),

are automatically sent to the involved users by e-mail,

according to a pre-formatted template. The users im-

mediately have a clear picture of the actions to be

taken for the processes they are involved in.

The deﬁnitions of the processes have been rep-

resented through XML code and manually added to

the system. The level of abstraction reached in pro-

cess management through the system allows to mod-

ify from outside the existing deﬁnitions or to add new

ones, without facing particular difﬁculties. The sys-

tem was built to meet the needs for quality of Degree

Programmes at the University of Salerno. Neverthe-

less, it can be used with a few or no changes in other

educational institutions with similar objectives.

In conclusion, the system is indeed a useful tool

in the management of quality of the courses. It al-

lows simpliﬁed care and facilitates the work of users

involved in the processes of self-assessment, provid-

ing a great support to perform the required tasks and

activities.

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