Education
Challenges of assuring quality higher education
Authors:
Michaela Martin; Antony Stella
Publisher:
International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2007
The number of private higher education providers, including transnational educational institutions, is growing rapidly. National authorities responsible for external quality assurance of such institutions are facing unprecedented challenges in assessing academic credentials and guarding against misinformation and fraud.
Publications from UNESCO’s International Institute for Education Planning report on a course attended by academics and education planners from 14 English-speaking African countries. The distance learning course focused on options available for setting up a system for external quality assurance.
Educational institutions and programmes are moving across borders in the form of e-learning, franchising or branch campuses. The increased mobility of professionals highlights the need for trusted, internationally-recognised external quality assurance (EQA) systems for education. Quality assurance cannot continue to depend on national administrative traditions as many countries do not have the capacity to make globally valid judgments about the quality of education programmes.
Private provision of higher education has expanded rapidly in Africa in recent years in response to strong demand. Authorities have struggled to use existing mechanisms to make assessments of the quality of transnational higher education institutions (HEIs). There are concerns about standards and the incidence of fraud in the marketing and delivery of programmes and the issuing of credentials.
Among the major issues discussed during the course were:
• The challenge of implementing EQA in HEIs in countries with little prior commitment to internal quality improvement and divergent academic traditions and cultures
• The use of sanctions in cases of unacceptably low standards or fraud
• The importance of the public release of data for purposes of transparency and accountability
• Moving from a tight focus on minimum inputs to meet educational standards to a broader view of whether EQA systems are ‘fit for purpose’
• The availability and cost of EQA experts
• Challenges posed by transnational HEIs; including lack of in-country accountability, high fees and strong bias towards urban centres.
Quality assurance institutions should be independent of government bureaucracies and academic establishments. Governments and donors must realise there is a cost – both financially and in terms of staff time. No matter how good the assurance system a government sets up, it will not be of much use if education systems are grossly lacking in human resources, infrastructure and equipment. There is a need to:
• set EQA priorities in small or resource-poor countries, with quality control, licensing and accreditation as a first priority
• build trust in assurance mechanisms through transparency and wide dissemination of findings
• help HEIs build their own internal quality assurance and improvement structures
• expand existing EQA activities to cover non-traditional HEI programmes – including part-time, distance or e-learning programmes
• promote cooperation between professional bodies and others with a common interest in maintaining EQA
• support UNESCO in consolidating data on transnational providers.
