Quality Assurance in Higher Education

Enhancing Academic Quality and Collegial Control: Insights from US Policy on the Ethical Conduct of Human Subjects’ Research

“…These principles were derived from the rigorous and respected research on effective university course design by the CMU Open Learning Institute. A substantial amount of the international research on QA policy (Williams and Harvey, 2015) has also explored faculty attitudes toward and satisfaction with national QA policies. Their views are often reported to be critical or negative.…”

“…Over the last twenty-five years as access to higher education rapidly expanded in many countries national policies designed to assure academic quality spread around the world (Dill and Beerkens, 2013;Williams and Harvey, 2015). Because these national quality assurance (QA) policies have had limited success in actually assuring and improving the quality of teaching and student learning in the university sector, they have been continually changed and adapted.…”

“…Ironically over the same time period as many countries have been experimenting with national QA policies for teaching and student learning, a number of developed nations led by the US have implemented a meta-regulatory approach to governing research in their universities (Office for Human Research Protections, 2017). This national effort to regulate university behavior in human subjects' research has received little attention in the burgeoning international literature on QA policies (Williams and Harvey, 2015). In sharp contrast to many national QA policies, the regulation of human subjects' research in the USA was designed from the outset to focus on the ethical norms essential to responsible research behavior and to increase incentives for collective actions by the faculty members within each university to strengthen institutional oversight of academic research.…”

Editorial

“…It is also appropriate as the journal has now reached its twentieth anniversary. The papers presented here help us to fill one of the key gaps in our knowledge of quality assurance in the sector that have recently been identified by Williams and Harvey (2015).…”

Editorial

“…In the last twenty years, there has been a challenge to traditional teaching in higher education which has led to a greater focus on learning and this has, at least coincided with the 'quality revolution' (Newton, 2002, p. 39;Williams & Harvey, 2015). In their article, which focuses on the Argentinian experience, Ariana de Vincenzi, Andrea Garau and Ariadna Guaglianone explore the impact that quality assurance processes have had on teaching and learning processes from the perspectives of their main stakeholders: students, teachers and academic authorities.…”