Fifteen Years ofQuality in Higher Education

Unpacking Quality Assurance Issues in Distance Education, Using the University of South Africa, a Mega Open Distance Learning University as an Example

“…There are those who see it positively -largely said to be university administrators and those who view it as an onerous, time consuming process as will be outlined. Against this background, others argue that there is a need for a new definition of quality to explain recent qualities in higher education-Harvey and Williams [1].…”

“…Quality is said to be both context specific and stakeholder specific. Harvey and Williams [1] also state aptly that "…quality has so many facets and different perspectives." Stakeholders in higher education are listed to include: government, QA agencies, universities and individual academics.…”

“…Harvey and Williams [1] state that the past fifteen years in higher education have been years of "…immense change and development in higher education, all arguably connected with quality" Prior to elaborating on these changes it is an opportune moment to attempt to unpack what the term quality assurance means. Quality assurance has been described in many ways depending on stakeholder positioning.…”

Quality and quality assurance in Ethiopian higher education

“…There is, for example, a lack of evidence on whether student learning 1 is significantly improving as a result of government policies focusing on the quality of higher education (Stensaker, 2003). A recent review of the empirical research studies on quality assurance undertaken by Harvey and Williams (2010) suggests that it is not clear whether quality assurance systems have truly enhanced higher education. This shows that there is lack of universal agreement on the extent to which the adoption of quality assurance in developed countries has generated the desired improvements in the core educational processes of universities.…”

“…Despite the progress that has been made through research and debate, there is still no universal consensus on how best to manage quality within higher education (Brookes and Becket, 2008). Much of the researches conducted so far focus on how quality could be defined, on the design and relevance of various national quality assurance schemes, on appraising the applicability of industrial models to higher education, on the tension between improvement and accountability in both external and internal quality assurance approaches, and on the effects of such quality assurance processes in higher education in the context of developed countries (Harvey and Williams, 2010;Pratasavitskaya& Stensaker, 2010).…”