External Quality Audit. Has It Improved Quality Assurance in Universities?

290 Pages·2013·9.214 MB·English

by  Mahsood Shah and Chenicheri Sid Nair (Eds.)

External Quality Audit
CHANDOS
LEARNING AND TEACHING SERIES
Series Editors: Professor Chenicheri Sid Nair and Dr Patricie Mertova
(emails: [email protected] and [email protected])
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External Quality Audit
Has it improved quality assurance
in universities?
EDITED BY
M S
AHSOOD HAH

AND
C S N
HENICHERI ID AIR
Oxford Cambridge New Delhi
Chandos Publishing
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Email: [email protected]
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www.chandospublishingonline.com
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Woodhead Publishing Limited
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First published in 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84334-676-0 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-78063-316-9 (online)
Chandos Learning and Teaching Series ISSN: 2052-2088 (print) and ISSN: 2052-2096 (online)
© The editors and contributors, 2013
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List of figures and tables
Figures
6.1 A model of an aligned curriculum (after Biggs, 2003) 94
14.1 HEI audits-accreditation cycles 213
16.1 A perceptual model of organizational behavior: how
perception becomes part of institutional learning 256
16.2 Toma’s Framework for building capacity 257
16.3 Challenges impacting on organizational learning 259
16.4 How institutional commitment or resistance to external
environment expectations is generated 262
16.5 Attributes shaping faculty beliefs and values and how
these can impact on organizational learning 263
16.6 Benefits/importance of risk management: ISO 31000 264
Tables
6.1 Timeline of important quality initiatives in Hong Kong 82
6.2 Commendations, affirmations and recommendations
for seven audits, classified in terms of focus on learning
environment, learning process or learning outcome 86–90
6.3 Summary of the LE, LP and LO data in Table 6.2 92
6.4 Distribution of a selected set of four topics across
affirmations and recommendations 95
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External Quality Audit
8.1 Evaluation results of the institutional audit 2002–6
(QAA, 2004–7) 122
12.1 Historical perspective: type and number of evaluations,
1997–2010 187
13.1 Evaluees’ (HEIs) opinions of the self-evaluation (%) 200
13.2 Evaluees’ (HEIs) opinions of the meeting with the
evaluation committee (%) 201
13.3 Evaluees’ (HEIs) opinions about results and
follow-up (%) 202–3
15.1 National quality, funding and review initiatives in
Australian higher education, 1954–2012 223–5
15.2 System-level quality strategies employed in Australian
higher education 233
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Preface
Governments in many countries are renewing their approach to higher
education quality assurance. In many countries external quality agencies
have been established to monitor the quality of teaching, research,
international education (including offshore) and other areas such as
governance, community engagement and various support services. The
renewal of quality in some countries comes at a time when governments
are using their political interest to increase the accountability of higher
education providers. For example, in some countries governments are
now providing performance funding based on access and equity
measures, in order to increase the proportion of disadvantaged students
in higher education. But while governments are supportive of student
growth in universities, they are at the same time warning universities that
such growth must not compromise standards and outcomes.
While external quality audits have been in place for many years in
some countries, there is limited research on whether such audits have
been effective in enhancing systems and processes in core and support
areas of the university and whether audits have improved standards and
outcomes. This book makes an important contribution by bringing
together the research of quality practitioners from 13 different countries:
Australia, New Zealand, Fiji Islands, Hong Kong, Malaysia, United
Kingdom, India, South Africa, Italy, Finland, Norway, Chile and the
United States of America. The book’s 16 chapters outline these countries’
experience in terms of the extent to which external quality audits have
been effective in improving quality assurance in different contexts. The
contributors include senior academics, senior administrators, researchers
and individuals working with external agencies. The book also includes
the views of a former a postgraduate student union president on whether
external quality audits have enhanced the student experience.
The book is timely because governments in many countries are
renewing quality assurance as a result of changes in the external
operating environment such as: the on-going growth of higher education;
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External Quality Audit
public funding of universities; flexible modes of delivery; growth of non-
university providers; internationalisation of higher education; and the
diversity of students.
Different countries’ experiences of the effectiveness of quality audits
are important as governments attempt to develop policy instruments to
increase the productivity of higher education, together with a renewed
approach to assuring the quality of education and research. As new
policy instruments are developed, assessing the effectiveness of external
quality audits is pivotal to setting new directions for the future.
Mahsood Shah and Chenicheri Sid Nair
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About the editors and contributors
Mahsood Shah is the Principal Advisor, Academic Strategy, Planning and
Quality with the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at
RMIT University (the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology),
Melbourne, Australia. In this role, Mahsood works closely with faculties
and schools and provides strategic advice to the Deputy Vice Chancellor
(Academic) on all aspects of academic strategy, academic quality, reviews
and enhancing institutional learning and teaching outcomes. Mahsood
has 20 years of work experience in tertiary education in various roles
with responsibilities related to strategy development, strategy
implementation and reviews, quality assurance, leading external quality
audits, review of academic and administrative units including review of
academic programmes, performance monitoring in all areas of the
university including the development of IT-enabled management
information capability, course accreditations with professional bodies,
stakeholder surveys, student experience and building institutional
research capacity in universities. Prior to joining RMIT University,
Mahsood led strategy development and quality assurance in three other
universities. Mahsood has also worked closely with many private for-
profit higher and vocational education providers in Australia in quality
assurance and institutional accreditation. Apart from his full-time role at
RMIT University, Mahsood is an Adjunct with the Faculty of Education
at the University of Canberra, Australia.
Sid Nair is currently with the Centre for Advancement of Teaching and
Learning, University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth. Prior to his
appointment to UWA, he was Quality Adviser (Research and Evaluation)
in the Centre for Higher Education Quality at Monash University,
Australia. He has extensive expertise in the area of quality development
and evaluation, and he also has considerable editorial experience.
Currently, he is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Quality
Assurance in Engineering and Technology Education and Associate
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External Quality Audit
Editor of the Journal of Quality Approaches in Higher Education. Prior
to this, he was also a Managing Editor of the Electronic Journal of
Science Education. Professor Nair is also international consultant in a
number of countries establishing quality centres, such as Oman and
India. He is also involved in a project to implement effective student
evaluations across Indian universities.
Timo Ala-Vähälä is a researcher at the Institute for Educational Research,
University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published on Finnish and
European quality assurance policies and on social aspects of sports. His
current interests are quality assurance in higher education and comparative
analyses of education.
Naziha Ahmad Azli is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of
Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor,
Malaysia. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from UTM in
2002. As the 4th Year Laboratory Coordinator in her Faculty, she
introduced the Problem-based Laboratory in 2007 as part of the
Electrical Engineering programme curriculum. She has written many
papers that are published in local and international conference proceedings
and academic journals related to her field of technical research and to
innovative teaching and learning methods and experiences. She has
recently given a series of talks related to Outcome-based Education to all
non-academic staff at UTM.
Jan Cameron succeeded John Jennings as the third Director of New
Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit (NZUAAU), a position that
she has held since March 2010. Jan has a BSc in Zoology from the
University of Canterbury, New Zealand and an MSocSc and DPhil in
Sociology from the University of Waikato. She was previously Assistant
Vice-Chancellor (AVC) (Academic) (1998–2010), Dean of Arts (1996–
98) and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Canterbury.
Her responsibilities as AVC (Academic) spanned the range of student
support, teaching and learning and included responsibility for both the
Academic Quality Assurance Unit and the University Centre for Teaching
and Learning. Jan has extensive experience of academic audit, programme
approval and accreditation: she managed the quality assurance and audit
self-review processes at Canterbury over two academic audit cycles and
served for many years on the Committee for University Academic
Programmes of the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors’ Committee. In
addition to managing audits for NZUAAU, Jan is on the New Zealand
auditor register and has served on an audit panel in Oman. She is a
Board member of the Asia-Pacific Quality Network.
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