Track 2: Quality in Higher Education
QUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Location: Track 2A + 2B: (Nador 13, 307/A and 303 - SEE FLOOR MAP)
Track Chairs:
Tatiana Yarkova & Diane Geraci • Central European University, Hungary.
Achieving and maintaining quality is central to universities’ drive to stay ahead of their competitors. As universities compete for students, faculty, staff, and resources, they demonstrate their quality by showcasing their placement in international rankings, their accreditation status from national, regional, or professional agencies, their award-winning faculty and the success of their graduates.
At the same time, achieving top quality would not be possible without cooperation – in research, teaching, faculty and student exchanges. Universities cooperate also when it comes to defining, maintaining, and measuring quality – from benchmarking of key performance indicators, to peer review of research and teaching, program and institutional evaluation, cooperation with accreditation agencies, and scholarly research into multiple dimensions of quality in higher education.
Yet, the relationship between numerous stakeholders involved in higher education goes beyond the competition-cooperation matrix to a complex web of partially competing and partially complimentary values, goals, and priorities. Public regulation of universities intends to control quality, albeit through ‘steering at a distance’, while universities vie for institutional autonomy. University leadership defines excellence by faculty publications and external research funding, while accrediting agencies emphasize assessment of student learning outcomes as the key indicator of quality. Students are concerned about transferable skills and marketability of their degrees, while faculty members remain largely rooted in their disciplines and traditional teaching models.
On the one hand, there appears to be a conceptual consensus about general trends and approaches to quality in higher education. Scholars of teaching and learning agree on the importance of the shift from teacher-centred to learner-centred environments, from passive knowledge reception to deep, active, technology-enhanced and independent learning. In turn, scholars of quality management agree on the importance of the shift from input to outcome-based approaches to quality assessment, and from static factual measurements to process-oriented continuous self-improvement. On the other hand, there is a potential mismatch between various understandings of quality and excellence by different stakeholders, and a mismatch between ‘espoused’ philosophies of quality and their practical applications by higher education institutions, accrediting agencies, and faculty members.
For this track, we welcome submissions that address questions in the following areas:
- How do prevalent quality paradigms translate into real-life quality systems? Do they live up to the expectations, and if not, what are the root causes for the mismatch?
- How does public regulation of quality in higher education shape and affect institutional quality priorities? How can we achieve a meaningful balance between regulation and autonomy that truly enhances quality?
- How can key stakeholders enhance cooperation to arrive at shared understandings of quality? Can the epistemological rift between accrediting agencies and faculty be repaired? What role can universities play in bridging this gap?
- How successful are institutional attempts to ‘embed’ quality culture? Is there evidence of faculty ownership? How can institutions re-shape their quality systems to remain compliant with regulations while ensuring a meaningful buy-in from their internal constituencies?
- How can prevalent quality management approaches be improved to help institutional quality initiatives find their ways into the classroom?
