Implementation of Quality Assurance Systems in Academic Staff Perspective – An Overview

Abstract

Cheng and Tam (1997, p. 23) suggest that "education quality is a rather vague and controversial concept " and Pounder (1999, p. 156) argues that quality is a "notoriously ambiguous term". The present study identifies and examines numerous challenges posed by standardisation and global approaches of quality assurance and their implications for educational restructuring, a special attention being paid to new forms of Quality Assurance Systems (QAS) covering the relation between teaching and research, students' feedback/students' implication or crossinstitutional assessments. The main themes are direct statements extracted from the interviewees' responses that were considered to be the most meaningful to the central areas of inquiry. They are: quality assurance system significance; satisfaction with QAS; QAS implementation issues; QAS organizational benefits; quality vs. quantity; research vs. teaching in terms of QA; students' feedback/students' implication; standardisation/general model vs. flexible approach; structural changes; and cross-institutional assessment tools.For a better understanding of the results presented in this chapter we should mention that each main theme presented here was covered by different members of the project team, i.e. the project team has been divided into three smaller, separate teams, each with its own tasks, in order to maximize the efficiency of the work. As a result, not all countries involved in the project managed to answer to all the research themes. Switzerland focused on the academic recruitment process, and it has not

Managing seniority in academia: three perspectives

“…Universities have introduced different kinds of indicators and quantitative targets to monitor and steer the work of academics (Kallio et al, 2015). Various research and teaching evaluation practices can be found in many European universities (Moraru et al, 2015). A fair evaluation requires good indicators.…”