Exploring the current landscape
of Quality Assurance, Quality Enhancement and Quality
Promotion and Capacity Development in Higher Education
- with a view to “What
next?” for QA in HE
Jan Botha
CREST and SciSTIP
Stellenbosch University
17 February 2015
Outline
Considering QA in Higher Education:
1. Where do we come from?
2. Where are we now?
3. Where do we want to be?
4. How do we get there?
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The Times They Are a-Changing (Dylan)
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
3
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
The 80/20 Principle
Effort
Results
R Koch 2007. The 80/20 principle. The secret of achieving more with less.
London: N Breadly Publishing
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Self-evident truths…
1. Knowledge production and science are beneficial to society.
2. A university education ensures a happier and more meaningful life.
3. Applying business principles and the management practices of the
private sector and commercial companies in higher education
institutions is necessary.
4. The academic side of universities and the support services side are
incommensurable, underpinned by different logics.
5. Quality assurance is a cause of quality: efficient quality assurance
enhances the quality of research, teaching & learning, and community
engagement.
6. Quality assurance consists (at minimum) of self-evaluation and peer
review.
7. Active learning is better than lectures.
8. Successful universities have dedicated quality assurance units
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The Audit Society
Michael Power (1997)
• Accountability and account giving is part of being a rational
human being, it sustains normal human exchange
• Trust releases us from the need for checking
• Can we imagine a society where nothing is trusted?
• Can we imagine society without checking at all?
• During 1980s and 1990s --- an “audit explosion”
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Financial audit
Environmental audit
Management audit
Value for money (VFM) audit
Medical audit
Teaching Quality Audits and Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE)
• “Managerial audit colonization” vs. “resistance/decoupling”
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Fifteen years of quality in Higher Education.
Lee Harvey & James Williams (2010)
• What have we learned from 15 years of
journal articles on external QA?
• What have we learned from 15 years of
journal articles on internal QA practices?
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Twenty Years of Quality Assurance in Higher Education:
What’s Happened and What’s Different?
Peter Ewell (2010)
What has happened?
• Steadily increasing focus on student learning
• Transformed modalities of teaching and learning
• Quality assurance is becoming trans-national
What is different?
• Documentation and intentionality
• Focus on teaching
• Transparency and public perception
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What next for QA?
Harvey & Newton (2004)
• to refocus and re-orientate it to the actual improvement of teaching
and learning
• to rebalance regulation for accountability and quality enhancement
• to link quality evaluation more explicitly to learning
• to prioritise improvement of the student learning experience as the
main demonstrable goal over making institutional quality-assurance
measures ever more efficient
• the need for more reflection and research-based evidence to
inform evaluation
• to make academics central to enhancement-led evaluation;
• and to connect external and internal evaluation processes in ways that
add real value to the latter.
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What next for QA?
Barnett (1994, p. 165)
•View quality evaluations as a ‘form of
enlightenment’ which deepens the selfunderstanding of academics, rather than as a
mechanism of ‘state surveillance’
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How do we get there?
More reflection and research-based evidence to
inform evaluation
Conceptualise QA as primarily a research endeavour and
not a management tool (The QEP approach)
Emphasise academic values
Take hands with “them,” (i.e. the academics)
Put World One on hold (for a while) and work in World 2
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The Three-worlds Framework
WORLD 3: WORLD OF METASCIENCE
Philosophy and history of science, research ethics, sociology of science, research
methodology
WORLD 2: WORLD OF SCIENCE
 Theories, models, typologies.
 Concepts and definitions.
 Findings, data.
 Instruments, scales, questionnaires.
RESEARCH PROCESS
PROBLEM - DESIGN - METHODOLOGY - CONCLUSIONS
WORLD 1: EVERYDAY LIFE
Social world: individual human beings; actions and events, organisations,
institutions, interventions, collectives and social objects
Physical world: plants, animals, atomic and subatomic particles
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Max Bergman’s “dynamically adjusting
research model”
Research
Question
Analysis
Data
Results
Partial
Provisional
“Postcard exercise”:
WHAT are we going to do?
What is the problem?
What is the unit of analysis (the phenomenon)
WHY is it important to do this?
The rationale / reason / motivation
HOW are we going to do this?
What data do we need?
Where and how will we find it?
How will we analyse it?
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Learning analytics
“A brave new world: Student surveillance in
Higher Education” (Prinsloo 2014)
•Students digital lives are but a small part of a
bigger whole, but our claims pretend as if
this minute part represents the whole
•We create smoke and claim we see a fire
•We seldom wonder what if our algorithms
are wrong, and what the long-term
implications for our students are
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