Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2010), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2010.12018caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 18, Issue 3

There is increasing interest in the harmonisation of standards in higher education internationally. Through the “Bologna process”, higher education providers in 47 European Union countries are moving towards a European Higher Education Area that has qualification frameworks for education in the Area. The framework shows what a holder of a particular qualification knows, understands and is able to do. Using such a framework forms a basis for mutual recognition of qualifications gained in different jurisdictions in the European Higher Education Area and facilitates freedom of movement of qualified people between countries.

Through accreditation processes, various national professional bodies have traditionally provided the assurance that professionals who have qualified from different institutions have very similar knowledge, understanding and capability when they are accorded professional recognition through professional membership. The national bodies charged with assuring the quality of higher education provision in various jurisdictions have used the accreditation by external professional bodies as part of their evidence base to audit institutions.

Much of this harmonisation of individual qualifications is taking place in an environment where there is increasing recognition that the mission of higher education institutions must, among other things, engage with and be responsive to the communities that they serve. This may generate some tension between the individual mission of the institution with its role in community engagement and the harmonisation of qualifications that ensures that there is comparability in what the holders of qualifications from different jurisdictions know, understand and are capable of doing.

The papers in this issue touch on some of the matters that arise in different jurisdictions when seeking to match the mission of the institution with the engagement with the community whilst seeking to maintain standards through professional accreditation or peer evaluation through organisations like the European University Association.

The first paper by Diana Amado Tavares, Maria João Rosa and Alberto Amaral focuses on the Institutional Evaluation Program that has been running under the auspices of the European Universities Association since 1994. The Institutional Evaluation Program provides institutions with an initial peer review and then, a number of years later, a follow-up visit is made and a follow-up report is produced. The paper is based on an analysis of 22 follow-up reports to investigate the extent to which the intervention in the form of an institutional evaluation has contributed to a quality improvement culture within the institution. However, the research took place at a time of some turbulence in higher education in Europe with the development of the Bologna process and later, the development of the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. The authors acknowledge that the Institutional Evaluation and follow-up was only one of the factors that may have influenced change and motivated improvement in the institutional context.

In the second paper, Abdulai Abukari and Trevor Corner examine the way that quality in higher education is addressed in the University for Development Studies that was established in 1992 in Ghana. The mission of the institution has a focus on equity, participation of the poor in higher education and meeting the needs of the local community stakeholders. The research used interviews, documents and artefacts in the data collection process. The focus on community engagement feeds through into the structure of the academic year, where the third trimester of each year of the first three years of the four year program involves studying the community, identifying problems in the community and, in the third year, proposals for intervention are written to address the community problems identified. The issues around quality and standards relate to the complexity of stakeholders and their diverse, and often mutually exclusive, expectations and requirements. Stakeholders include the students and staff, the local community, the state, professional bodies and international donors. Consequently, the equivalence of qualifications that may be required by the professional bodies, for example the Ghana Medical Association, some staff and, perhaps the donor community may be inconsistent with the mission that the university exists to fulfil as contained in the legislation establishing the institution.

In the third paper Jean Hertzman and Robert Ackerman highlight the importance of the food services sector to the American economy and employment measures. Following a very gradual move from the traditional “apprentice” model, there has been a much more rapid move towards Associate Degrees in Culinary Arts with an associated increase in the number and scale of providers. In this case, the goal is to identify standards and quality measures that are appropriate for use in the context of culinary arts programs. The American Culinary Federation Education Foundation Accrediting Commission is an accreditation body for culinary arts programs and the authors used the American Culinary Arts Federation as part of the selection criteria for inclusion in the survey sample. The researchers concluded from their exploratory research that the Associate Degree in Culinary Arts is a hybrid form of higher education where quality assessment would benefit from some development work.

In the final paper, Maria Tsinidou, Vassilis Gerogiannis and Panos Fitsilis report that, in response to the Bologna process, Greece established the Hellenic Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. The authors used a survey instrument developed by this agency as a basis for their investigation into the determinants of quality in higher education using an analytical hierarchical process. By distributing the survey instrument to three hundred students with a response rate of almost 90 percent, the authors were able to assemble a significant bank of data. The analysis of that data enabled the authors to gain insight into the determinants of quality in higher education for their institution. Furthermore, opportunities for improvement for the institution were also identified.

We trust that you will find the articles in this issue provide a useful and interesting source of stimulation to think about how we reconcile some of the issues that arise from the need to maintain standards and comparability of equivalent qualifications whilst at the same time seeking to fulfil the individual institutional missions in increasingly varied institutional contexts.

John Dalrymple