A prospective model for aligning educational quality and student experience in international higher education

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to develop a model that addresses and bridges the gap between quality management and student experience. The model incorporates the most commonly occurring systems, namely: quality control; quality assurance; quality audit; quality assessment; quality enhancement; and quality management. The paper highlights the key elements of these approaches and constructs a model that provides a more comprehensive tool for accurately implementing and measuring quality in international higher education. The model, as a proposed conceptual framework, can be used by managers in Transnational Education (TNE), both at home and host institutions, to facilitate improvements in the TNE student experience while at the same time meet wider institutional objectives about educational quality.

KEYWORDS:

• New managerialism
• student experience
• quality management
• transnational education
• internationalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The National Student Survey in the UK.

2 The Postgraduate Teaching Experience Survey in the UK.

3 Teaching Excellence Framework.

4 Potentially, this could lead to increased attention by HEIs, governments and researchers to go beyond the measurement of service quality in higher education to explore and understand student expectations and perceptions. Nevertheless, as will be discussed later in this paper, the existing quality management models appear to focus only on the measurement of service quality outcomes, summarised under the term “the student experience”. For example, in the UK, the National Student Survey (NSS) focuses on student satisfaction and service quality indicators, while the Key Information Set (KIS), introduced in 2012, is criticised for promoting standardisation (Davies 2012).