Quality Assurance of Cross‐border Higher Education

Abstract

Cross‐border higher education raises a number of challenges and there is a growing awareness among quality assurance agencies that they have to work together to address these challenges. The joint effort of UNESCO–OECD to develop Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross‐border Higher Education is an educational response to this need. This paper presents the background and outcome of discussions of the quality assurance agencies with specific reference to these Guidelines, during the workshop held at The Hague in May 2006. Section 1 presents the background to the theme. Capacity building emerges as a major challenge to be addressed. Section 2 explains how UNESCO–OECD joint effort is an educational response to this challenge. Section 3 argues that the Guidelines are helpful to address the concerns of different perspectives but also raises six specific questions that need attention. Section 4 summarises what emerged during the parallel group discussions on those six questions. Finally, section 5 draws the emerging pattern from the discussions and attempts to identify future directions for the networks such as INQAAHE and its member agencies.

Keywords:

• quality assurance
• cross‐border higher education
• transnational education
• UNESCO–OECD Guidelines
• cooperation in quality assurance
• mutual trust in quality assurance

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge that this paper builds on some of the earlier works on quality assurance and the Guidelines. Section 1 is based on the author's paper presented in the INQAAHE 2005 conference which was later published in Quality in Higher Education, Volume 11, Number 3. The author of this paper was a member of the expert group that drafted the UNESCO–OECD Guidelines for wider consultation. Section 2 of this paper is a revised version of the author's presentation introducing the UNESCO–OECD Guidelines to the participants of the regional seminar on the ‘Implications of WTO / GATS on higher education in Asia and the Pacific’ held at Seoul in April 2005. A brief version of this was presented by the author in the INQAAHE workshop (Hague, 2006).