Editorial

Citation

Srikanthan, G. (2009), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 17 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2009.12017daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 17, Issue 4

The articles in this issue deal with a range of topics, from the conceptual ones like culture, performance etc., to analytical techniques associated with service quality and student evaluation, all forming different facets of assuring quality in education. The cast of contributing authors continue to be truly international in nature, drawn both from the East and the West, attesting yet again to the world-wide significance of, and interest in, quality issues in education.

In the first article Graham Badley provides an elaborate account of the PhD by published work focusing especially on quality assurance issues such as eligibility of candidates, the nature of the submission itself, supervision and assessment procedures. The article offers a detailed discussion of the criteria to be met by candidates in writing a critical appraisal as a central feature of their submission.

In the next article Ulf Daniel Ehlers, aims at developing a holistic understanding of quality in higher education. He posits that the existing debates about accreditation or quality process standards as insufficient, and proposes an enhanced model for quality culture in an educational organisation.

In the following article Tho Nguyen argues that although it is well known that firms can use signals to inform consumers about the unobservable aspect of their products or services in a market where asymmetric information exists, research on the relationship between signal quality and service quality is largely ignored. The study investigates the role of signal quality in the quality of Master of Business Administration (MBA) education in Vietnam.

In the subsequent paper Larry Crumbley and Kenneth Reichelt argue that although student evaluation of teaching (SET) questionnaires are used in many countries, much of the current research questions the validity of these surveys. Instructors engage in impression management when SET data are used for control purposes. Universities worldwide risk legal action when they defame faculty members by releasing unreliable and invalid SET results.

In the next article Suleyman Yildiz and Ali Kara, argue that new scales with a much narrower focus need to be developed for evaluating the performance at the micro levels within a university because of the unique nature of different academic units. They present a study whose objective is to develop an instrument for measuring service quality in the School of Physical Education and Sports Sciences.

In the following article Naceur Jabnoun notes that the ranking of top universities in the world has generated an increased interest in the societal factors that enhance university performance. The paper identifies economic and cultural factors that affect the number of top ranking universities in a country.

In the following section Hamish Coates reviews the book Trust and the Public Good by William Tierney. The author argues that the concept of trust is critical to the future of higher education, given its decentralised nature. The reviewer concludes that Tierney’s examination of trust as an organising principle offers a persuasive mechanism for advancing the academy’s interests in the broader landscape of society.

Subsequently, the book Borderless Knowledge: Understanding the New Internationalisation of Research and Higher Education in Norway, edited byÅse Gornitzka and Liv Langerfeldt is reviewed by Christopher Ziguras. The reviewer opines that this edited volume does manage to be surprisingly useful for thinking about how internationalisation progresses, and how it can be studied. In particular, he finds that the rigour and comprehensiveness of the methods used by the authors of each chapter to be outstanding.

Before concluding, a personal note from me as the Associate Editor of the journal. I have had the privilege of serving in my capacity since Professor John Dalrymple took over as the Editor in 2003. Over the years we have seen a healthy improvement in readership, not only in numbers, but in their geographical spread across different countries. Similarly, our content offerings have also been expanding with a very wide participation of authors from around the globe. I hope the trend would continue, and journal would continue to enjoy a similar support from the readership and authors in the future years. My sincere thanks go to the academic colleagues, helpful publishing staff in Emerald and the cooperative band of reviewers and authors. Overall the pleasant interactions behind all this have been a source of very rich experience which I would be cherishing for quite a few years, as I head into my retirement years.

Finally, the editorial team hopes that the articles included for your consideration in this issue will provide inspiration for reflection, individually and collectively, to review some of the philosophies of, and practices for, quality in education.

G. SrikanthanAssociate Editor, QAE, for the Editorial Team