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The purpose of this article is to analyze main principles, forms and approaches to education quality evaluation in the process of establishment, development and crucial changes in the state accreditation of educational institutions and study programmes in Russian higher education in the last 20 years.

The major research method used in the paper is the qualitative analysis of legal and statistical documents, research papers and accreditation practices, which impacted the development and transformation of accreditation forms in Russia.

The transformation process of state accreditation during the last 20 years was conditioned by the changes in the state education policy and socio-economic situation. In a short period, under the influence of internal and external factors, Russian higher education has experienced significant changes in the structure of higher education and quality assurance. This resulted in different approaches to accreditation: state and independent, mandatory and voluntary, national and international.

The research outcomes may be applicable in the countries with developing accreditation systems and comparable scope of education.

The study identifies the tendencies in the development of higher education and quality evaluation.

The paper systematizes the tendencies of development in quality assurance and distinguishes specific features and diversity of forms of the quality assurance in one of the largest systems of higher education.

The built environment is a complex sector that demands coordination and cooperation of stakeholders. Construction projects from the complex sector require skills, services, and integration of major disciplines in the built environment. Sustainability of the major disciplines' standards regarding the appropriateness of the built environment tertiary education cannot be over-emphasised in Nigeria. Studies concerning Nigeria's built environment programmes accreditation (BEPA) in the 21st-century education system are scarce. Thus, the study investigated the relevance and perceived factors hindering Nigeria's BEPA in the 21st-century education system. Also, the study proffered measures to improve Nigerian built environment tertiary education accreditation ranking.

Data were sourced from elite virtual interviews across Nigeria. The interviewees were knowledgeable about Nigeria's built environment programmes accreditation, and many of them have been directly or indirectly involved. The investigators utilised a thematic analysis for the collated data and enhanced it with secondary sources.

The study revealed that several Nigerian academia in the built environment lack fame in research, publication, and citations due to barriers in their workplace. It has hindered their global institution's accreditation and ranking standards. Findings identified inadequate basic infrastructure, obsolete curricula, lack of research novelty, lack of higher education institutions funding, inadequate staffing and lax upskilling and reskilling, and unethical practices “systematic corruption” as major factors hindering BEPA. Also, findings proffered measures to improve Nigeria's BEPA global ranking.

The study is limited to the perceived barriers and measures to improve BEPA in the 21st-century in Nigeria via semi-structured virtual interviews. Future study is needed to validate the findings as highlighted in the thematic network.

The paper confirms that the BEPA requires innovative and multidisciplinary measures to improve the global ranking of these programmes and, by extension, the higher education institutions ranking globally. The paper would stir major stakeholders and advance the built environment programmes quality accreditation regarding international best practices and maintain the minimum standards.

The paper comprehensively analyses the perceived factors and proffered measures to improve Nigeria's BEPA in the 21st-century via a thematic network. The outcome intends to improve the global ranking and stir stakeholders to reposition and showcase Nigeria's built environment programmes to the world.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the experience of the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications (HKCAAVQ) in carrying out cross-border quality assurance (QA) in Macao.

The paper draws on case studies of two very different QA exercises conducted by HKCAAVQ in Macao in 2015 and 2016. The first was a program accreditation conducted as part of a pilot of the external QA standards and process developed by the Macao Government’s Tertiary Education Services Office (GAES) for potential use by all higher education institutions (HEIs) in Macao. The second was a learning program review (LPR) conducted by HKCAAVQ following a request by a HEI in Macao using QA standards and processes developed by HKCAAVQ.

The key findings from the case studies are that an agency engaging in cross-border QA needs to have a clear rationale for their engagement, ensure that they are “fit-for-purpose” in terms of the context of the employing jurisdiction and the expectations of their HEIs and have a clear understanding of the relevant legal framework.

Cross-border QA is likely to grow in importance and activity in the coming years. The example of Macao provides a useful reference point for governments, HEIs and external quality assurance agency considering engaging in cross-border QA activities.

This study examines how an externally imposed management control system (MCS) – hospital accreditation – influences the salience of organisational tensions and consequently attitudes of management towards the system.

Data are collected using a case study of a large public hospital in Spain. In-depth interviews were conducted with 27 senior and middle managers across different functions. Relying on the organisational dualities classification in the literature, tensions are unpacked and analysed.

Evidence is presented of how hospital accreditation increases the salience of organisational tensions arising from exposition of the organisational dualities of learning, performing, organising and belonging. Salient tensions were evident in the ambivalent attitudes of management towards the hospital accreditation system.

The role of mandatory external control systems in exposing ambivalence and tensions will be of interest to organisational managers.

The study extends the management control literature by identifying an active role for an external MCS (accreditation) in increasing the salience of organisational tensions and triggering ambivalence. Contrary to the prior literature, the embedding of both poles of an organisational duality into the MCS is not a necessary precondition for increased tension salience. The range of attitudes towards MCSs beyond those specified in the previous literature (positive/negative/neutral) is extended to include ambivalence.

I historically compare changes in institutional frameworks creating academic positions linked to temporary employment by analyzing university employment statistics in Chile, Colombia, Germany, and the USA. I find that temporary academic positions were institutionalized through the creation of previously inexistent academic categories called a contrata in Chile, de cátedra in Colombia, “junior professor” without tenure in Germany and “postdoc” in the USA; used in higher education and employment laws since 1989, 1992, 2002, and 1974, respectively. Under institutional frameworks demanding the maximization of students and research, universities have increasingly contracted academics through temporary contracts under rationales that differ between regions. In Colombia and Chile, public university leaders and owners of private universities contract such teaching positions to expand student numbers through lowering costs. In Germany and the USA, employment insecurity is mostly driven by temporary scientific positions under a main rationale of scientific expansion. The share of temporary positions has increased exponentially in Colombia and Germany in recent decades, whereas in the USA there has only been an increase since 2012. Moreover, in Chile, the share of permanent positions has decreased since 2012. The common trend is one of isomorphism of vertical academic structures sharing a pyramidal form, with a wide base of academics working under conditions of contractual insecurity. Such trends follow a rationale for maximization of student numbers as well as administration, and scientific production that is in tension with prioritizing wellbeing and improvement of academics’ working conditions. Yet, in these environments, the institution of tenure in the USA and recent Chilean regulations on accreditation represent mechanisms counteracting precarious employment.

After the “quantity era,” today higher education has entered into the “quality era” and as “the gate keepers of quality,” quality assurance agencies (QAAs) are playing more and more irreplaceable important roles and their social status are becoming more and more prominent. However, how to guarantee the quality of the QAAs? Who can review the QAAs? The purpose of this paper is based exploration of these questions.

Following the founding of the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR) for Higher Education, the Asia Pacific Quality Register (APQR) became the second in the international quality assurance (QA) networks to implement QA register, in 2015 with initiative of Asia-Pacific Quality Network.

This paper first retrospects the history and process of APQR, and subsequently the implementation of APQR is described in detail from the two aspects of the criteria and the procedure, and at the end, the paper concludes with a summary of the three characteristics of this first formal implement of APQR: APQR is an international register open to all the QAAs; APQR emphasizes characteristics evaluation of diversity; and APQR highlights the combination of quantitative assessment and qualitative assessment.

Today on the international stage of QA, APQR has emerged as “the watchman of quality” in the Asia-Pacific region as counterpart of EQAR in Europe. How far away does such newly emerging form of guaranteeing the QAAs’ quality go forward, what is its future prospects and other concerning issues, are some of the question that need enthusiastic attention and contribution.

The purpose of this study is to investigate conceptually and empirically the direct and indirect relationships between university social responsibility (USR), university social innovation strategy (USIS) in terms of social awareness (SA), intention for social innovation (ISI), organisational structure for social innovation (SSI) and innovativeness in social value creation (ISVC) and gaining a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) at quality-accredited faculties of an emerging market.

A conceptual model was presented and a mixed-methods approach was exploited to fill a research gap detected in strategic corporate social innovation literature. The authors formed a data collection team that contacted all the quality-accredited public and private/international faculties, of which 109 faculties in 11 Egyptian governorates responded and their quality units filled questionnaires that were analysed by structural equation modelling. For comprehensive understanding, qualitative interviews were set to gather data from managers/leaders and teaching staff working at those faculties in quality management and community engagement practices as well as students.

Results demonstrated that USR positively and significantly influenced SCA and USIS. Further, USIS (in terms of ISI, SSI and ISVC) positively and significantly influenced SCA. However, USIS (in terms of SA) had a positive yet insignificant influence on SCA. Indirectly, USIS was found to be partially mediating USR–SCA relationship.

University leaders/staff can gain insights on how to adopt differentiation strategies, which enable their institutions to shift from being just socially responsible to becoming socially innovative by presenting solutions to social, economic, cultural, environmental and health-care problems/challenges within their communities in general and during pandemics. This can be sustained through developing innovative quality-based processes/programmes/services related to education, research and community outreach that better serve social needs to be quality-accredited and unique over their rivals.

Satisfying social needs through promoting innovative processes/services can reinforce a favourable social change.

From a cross-disciplinary perspective, the authors interwove conceptually sparse literature of strategic, operations, knowledge capacity and innovation management that studied university social innovation research area. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that examined empirically USR–USIS–SCA relationships of quality-accredited faculties in an emerging economy during Covid-19 pandemic.

This study aims to properly and objectively assess the students’ study progress in bachelor programmes by applying statistical process control (SPC). Specifically, the authors focused their analysis on the variation in performance rates in business studies courses taught at a Spanish University.

A qualitative methodology was used, using an action-based case study developed in a public university. Previous research and theoretical issues related to quality indicators of the training programmes were discussed, followed by the application of SPC to assess these outputs.

The evaluation of the performance rate of the courses that comprised the training programs through the SPC revealed significant differences with respect to the evaluations obtained through traditional evaluation procedures. Similarly, the results show differences in the control parameters (central line and control interval), depending on the adopted approach (by programmes, by academic year and by department).

This study has inherent limitations linked to both the methodology and selection of data sources.

The SPC approach provides a framework to properly and objectively assess the quality indicators involved in quality assurance processes in higher education.

This paper contributes to the discourse on the importance of a robust and effective assessment of quality indicators of the academic curriculum in the higher education context through the application of quality control tools such as SPC.

Quality assurance (QA) in open and distance learning (ODL) has always become universal concerns of stakeholders. The quality of ODL has been confronted with challenges in terms of the diversity of inputs, processes, the complex supply chain management of ODL and recent paradigm shift into online learning. Assuring the quality of ODL are daunting tasks at individual, institution and system levels. Completed before the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, this study aims to better understand the implementation of QA system in three Asian open universities (OUs), namely University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia and Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), Pakistan.

A qualitative method was employed involving analysis of documents of the three Asian OUs and focus group discussions and interviews with management and staff. Data collected were then analyzed to draw conclusions and possible recommendations.

Findings of this study presented good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement of the QA system in the three Asian OUs. Focusing on students and stakeholders in their QA effort, this study has revealed that quality begins with inner self and is multidimensional. QA is principally viewed as continuous improvement, as mechanism and assessment and as effort at exceeding expectations of students and stakeholders. The recent challenge for QA is to embrace a delicate process of ODL transformation into online digital system. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has further implications and challenged QA implementation in ODL in higher education into the next level of complexity.

This study revealed the diversities in how OUs met the societal needs of their respective stakeholders and addressed the challenges ahead for QA in ODL.

These findings were expected to enhance the understanding of the theory and practice of QA in ODL and to contribute to quality improvement of ODL programs.

A transition toward sustainable development requires engagement of university students in transformative learning. Therefore, quality frameworks and processes should support deep approaches to sustainable development in higher education. Research and initiatives that connect sustainable development, higher education and quality assurance (QA) are lacking. This study aims to explore to what extent quality assurance agencies in Europe support transformative learning for sustainable development in their frameworks.

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of national QA frameworks in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) to assess whether they support transformative learning for sustainable development. First, frequency analysis was undertaken; second, a blended coding approach was used to investigate whether and how transformative learning for sustainable development is addressed.

Overall, the authors found little support for transformative learning for sustainable development in most QA frameworks. One exception is the framework of the United Kingdom, which includes a specific guide on education for sustainable development wherein transformative learning is prominently mentioned. To a lesser extent, some support exists in the frameworks of Estonia, Holy See, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Although the transformative learning for sustainable development approach is not explicitly mentioned in most QA frameworks, many of them contain opportunities to highlight it. France and The Netherlands offer guidelines and criteria for acquiring a sustainable development label, while Andorra suggests including the sustainable development goals in institutional quality assessment.

The research provides the first map of how countries within the EHEA support transformative learning for sustainable development in national QA systems.