This issue of Quality in Higher Education contains papers that both address perennial questions relating to quality and some unusual but equally important issues. The journal has always been concerned with how quality is defined and remains the principle forum for that debate. Although there are some core definitions of quality as it relates to higher education, the most famous being that of Harvey and Green (Citation1993), understanding of quality constantly changes along with the ever-changing sector. The articles published in this issue reflect some of these changes in focus in recent years. They explore issues such as whether agencies continue to view quality as simply about accountability and addressing consumer concerns; how to measure student engagement rather than student consumerism; the importance of the physical environment on learning; and the continuing challenge of globalisation and transnational provision of higher education.
The long-standing tension between quality assurance and how it really suits higher education continues to attract attention. Royce Sadler argues in this issue that, particularly in the domain of teaching, learning and assessment, the fundamental tenets of quality assurance require critical scrutiny. The need for quality assurance, argues Sadler, is often assumed without giving adequate consideration to the nature of the subject of assessment itself. He argues that quality assurance needs to be reconceptualised and be grounded in authoritative and properly formulated academic achievement standards applied to actual student works, performances and course grades.
Ming Cheng critically reviews the fitness-for-purpose and value-for-money definitions of quality that have been dominant for some years amongst quality assurance agencies. She argues that these two definitions are important but ignore the emancipatory power of higher education and the development needs of academics and students. She proposes that quality should instead be understood as a virtue of professional practice, which can help academics and students to build their commitment to learning and teaching. A model of quality assessment underpinned by this notion would be a supportive mechanism to enhance academics’ professionalism and to engage students in learning.
Quality assurance has long been associated with accreditation. For Wächter et al. (Citation2015), accreditation is one of the potential outcomes of quality assessment; for Harvey (Citation2004–2017), accreditation does not always mean that robust quality assessment has been conducted. In this issue, Marta van Zanten highlights the importance of robust, external review and assessment practices. In her study of accreditation of medical schools in the United States and Europe, van Zanten outlines useful experiences from a variety of agencies and argues that external quality assessment has the potential for providing robust evidence for accreditation.
Van Zanten’s focus, interestingly, is on the importance of the student experience in medical training. Student engagement is the principal focus of the article by Geoff Woolcott, Daniel Chamberlain, Robyn Keast and Ben Farr-Wharton, who argue that support and intervention for undergraduate students may also benefit from models of engagement and success as well as conventional risk and failure. Using multifactorial approaches based in a combination of aspects of social network theory and social ecology theory, this study of experience in Australia indicates that models of academic success are suited to examination of the broader issues of student agency and undergraduate university education. The success networks developed are uniquely student-centred and place-based and may serve as more nuanced models for university intervention and support structures and mechanisms.
Increasing attention is being given to the physical space inhabited by higher education (Temple, Citation2014). In this issue, Simon Leonard, Robert Fitzgerald, Matt Bacon and Danny Munnerley explore the use and development of learning spaces in higher education and the challenges in assessing their impact. They argue that learning spaces are changing with collaborative, agile and technology-enabled spaces ever more popular but despite the massive investment required to create these new spaces, current quality systems are poorly placed to account for the value they create. This is an explorative paper that maps existing practice and contributes to the discussion about how the academic community gauges the quality of its teaching.
One of the biggest challenges facing contemporary higher education how to judge the quality of transnational higher education programmes, taking into account cultural differences between provider countries and receivers. In this issue, Keith Sharp explores this challenge and argues that there is a need for coherent policies for transnational higher education provision and identifies the root of the problem as a failure by regulatory régimes to distinguish between standards and quality.
School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK
[email protected]
References
- Harvey, L., 2004–2017, Analytic Quality Glossary, (Quality Research International). Available at http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/glossary/ (accessed 16 July 2017).
- Harvey, L. & Green, D., 1993, ‘Defining quality’, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 18, pp. 9–34.10.1080/0260293930180102
- Temple, P. (Ed.), 2014, The Physical University: Contours of space and place in higher education (Abingdon, Routledge).
- Wächter, B., Kelo, M., Lam, Q.K.H., Effertz, P., Jost, C. & Kottowski, S., 2015, University Quality Indicators: A critical assessment (Brussels, European Parliament).