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Large-group activities has increased in higher education since year 2000. Research focused on the possibility to have positive effects on students' learning, regardless the number of students by identifying facilitating factors. Hence, the achievement of learning results is used as a criterion of effectiveness. This review summarizes the findings of research studies on conditions that determine the effectiveness of large-group learning activities in higher education contexts published from 1996 to 2016. The PRISMA declaration for conducting literature reviews was followed. Articles were searched through the ERIC, Web of Science, SCOPUS, SCIELO, and EBSCO databases, including additional sources. A total of seventy-eight articles met the inclusion criteria and were selected for a thematic analysis. These studies came from a wide range of disciplines, type of institutions and locations. Five themes emerged as conditions that facilitate the effectiveness of large-group learning activities: (1) student-teacher and student-student interaction, (2) implementation of active learning strategies, (3) classroom management, (4) students' motivation and commitment, (5) and the use of online teaching resources. The discussion is centered on the conditions by which largegroup activities can be effective learning strategies in terms of student's achievement of learning outcomes.

In Chile, as well as in most of Latin America, public policies for higher education have recently adopted a focus on quality assurance and accreditation systems. Uncertainty, however, still exists in terms of the quality assurance consistency in the current Chilean accreditation system, especially in terms of the relation between public policy quality indicators for higher education and their relation to accreditation outcomes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to make a first explorative attempt to investigate the relationships between these indicators and the results of undergraduate programme accreditation. We hypothesised that public policy quality indicators of first year of study dropout, employment at graduation, and ratio of real to formal graduation time frame would be strongly correlated to undergraduate programme accreditation as well as largely explaining its accreditation-year variance. By means of correlation and multiple regression analyses we found small-sized associations, being first year dropout the only significant predictor of programme accreditation, explaining a 9.4% of its variance. These results raise questions regarding the consistency between the aims of public policy for higher education and the current accreditation system. This study should be of value to policy-makers, managers, and curriculum developers in terms of this initial analysis of the consistency between quality indicators and the accreditation system. Further research is necessary to make a systematic and in-depth assessment of the impact of quality assurance mechanisms to provide better rationale for making important decisions such as when defining the characteristics of the accrediting institutions as well as for establishing effective ways to achieve the proposed public policy objectives.