Enhancing Quality in Higher Education by Land Ray;Gordon George;

Author:Land, Ray;Gordon, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Australian Quality Scene Compared with International Policy and Practice

Like that in many developed nations, Australian higher education continues to be challenged by the competing tensions between accountability and enhancement (Baird, 2010). Reviewing the outcomes of twenty years of academic audit in the New Zealand context, Houston (2010, p.178) observes that quality assurance as accountability has been privileged over quality as learning, noting that little has been accomplished in efforts to connect assurance to a culture of improvement despite ‘increasingly sophisticated assurance mechanisms’. Similar challenges are evident in South Africa, where Fourie and Alt (2000) observe the competing challenges of implementing a national quality assurance framework and sustaining and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning at the local level. Like Houston, they argue for a shift to an improvement-led culture.

Some nations, like Scotland, explicitly articulate the importance of quality enhancement in their higher education system. The Enhancement-Led Review Process (ELIR) conducted under the auspices of the Scottish Quality Assurance Agency illustrates a commitment to enhancement that is not as clearly articulated in the Australian context. In Europe, Hopbach, a former president of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), refers to one of the main aims of the Association as developing quality assurance processes as core instruments for both enhancement and accountability purposes (ENQA, 2010, p. 24). The language of quality enhancement is evident in various European Universities Association publications such as the Guidelines for Quality Enhancement in European Joint Master Programmes (European Universities Association, 2006), which provides explicit support to assist institutions to assume responsibility for enhancing the quality of their programmes.

In the United States, with its complex array of decentralized quality assurance arrangements across states, Ewell (2007) observes that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), for instance, requires a ‘desk audit’ to determine preliminary compliance with nominated standards in advance of an enhancement-oriented team visit centred on the institution’s own Quality Enhancement Plan. Such explicitly enhancement-focused approaches have not been as evident in Australian higher education policy over the past thirty years. As a new era of higher education policy reform and regulation dawns, the challenge to recognize and reward a shift from quality assurance to quality enhancement paradigms is now greater than ever.

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