This paper explores the digitalisation of teaching and learning understood as external processes, influenced by government and international trends and as internal processes within the institutions, in Denmark and Norway. These are countries with similarities regarding digitalisation and educational systems. In the internal processes, there was some use of digital technology in teaching and learning when initiated from administration including IT-staff, in collaboration with academic leaders. There was little or only limited reported use of technology for teaching and learning, when the processes were initiated by administration together with enthusiasts among faculty staff, who did not have leadership roles or influence on change. There was more reported use of technology in teaching and learning in Denmark than Norway. The paper discusses possible explanations for these findings and thus illuminates how processes of digitalisation are influenced by broader governance arrangements, institutional maturity and academic and administration staffs.

In this paper, employability is regarded as an aspect of quality of higher education, or more precisely, the benefit and usefulness of the study programme for career and work tasks. The analyses are based on a comparative survey among graduates in 13 countries, five to six years after graduation. The information about employability, or the usefulness of the study programme related to work is based on the graduates' own perceptions. The extent to which employability is related to characteristics of the study programme is investigated, in addition to country differences and to what extent the differences are affected by the graduates' labour market experiences. The analyses show that study programme characteristics have great impact on the value of the programme in the world of work. These characteristics also have an impact on the initial country differences with regard to employability. The quality indicators have minor influence on the chance of obtaining a job but significant effect on doing the job.

The growing interest for measurement of learning outcomes relates to long lines of development in higher education, the request for accountability, intensified through international reforms and movements such as the development and implementation of qualifications frameworks. In this article, we discuss relevant literature on different approaches to measurement and how learning outcomes are measured, what kinds of learning outcomes are measured, and why learning outcomes are measured. Three dimensions are used to structure the literature: Whether the approaches emphasise generic or disciplinary skills and competence, self-assessment or more objective test based measures (including grades), and how the issue of the contribution from the education program or institution (the value-added) are discussed. It is pointed out that large scales initiatives that compare institutions and even nations seem to fall short because of the implicit and explicit differences in context, whilst small-scale approaches suffer from a lack of relevance outside local contexts. In addition, competence (actual level of performance) is often confused with learning (gain and development) in many approaches, laying the ground for false assumptions about institutional process-quality in higher education.K E Y W O R D S assessment, higher education, knowledge, learning, learning outcomes, measurement

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Studies of universities' external engagement have found that individual and discipline-level characteristics explain most of the participation in different kinds of external engagement activities, but characteristics at the institutional level are often not studied explicitly. In this paper, we analyze how five different forms of external engagement are influenced by a range of factors, using a multilevel regression approach on a complex combined dataset including a survey to 4400 Norwegian academics and detailed data on the 31 higher education institutions where the academics are employed. The goal is to test whether university-level characteristics matter for participation in different kinds of external engagement, when we also control for the influence of individual and discipline level factors. We find that university-level variables explain few of the differences in external engagement among academic staff in general. Still, there are important nuances, and the multi-level analysis has revealed a complex picture of influences on forms of external engagement among academics. Participation in consultancy and commercialization among academics is in particular influenced by university-level factors.