Assuring quality in transnational higher education: a matter of collaboration or control?

Abstract

As transnational education collaborations increase so too do concerns about the quality of provision. To address these concerns, national codes of good practice have been written to guide exporting institutions on how to set up and manage international collaborations, so that academic standards and student experiences are not compromised. This article attempts to show how linguistic analysis can be used to decode underlying messages in the way we describe quality assurance processes. It looks at three codes of practice from major exporters of higher education: USA, UK and Australia. The article focuses specifically on the roles and responsibilities of the awarding higher education institution and their partner, issues of equivalence and opportunities for adaptation of curricula to meet global and local requirements. The analysis raises questions about the portrayal of transnational higher education within the documents.

Keywords:

• transnational
• quality assurance
• discourse analysis
• internationalisation
• higher education

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Higher Education Close‐Up conference in Cape Town, South Africa in June 2008. I would like to thank Dr Chidochangu Mpamhanga for the discussions that shaped this paper, and Dr Nick Pilcher, Dane Lukic and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.