A Model for Quality Assurance in Higher Education: A Case Study with Nigeria Higher Education

Abstract

Nigeria being the most populous nation in Africa with over 55 % of its population as children and youths of school age has not witnessed a corresponding development in infrastructure, educational facilities and resources to cater for the growing population of students. In quest for better standards, especially since the mid-1980s, there has been high mobility of students, academic staff and professionals. Also, new methods of delivery educational services and cross-border providers have emerged over the years, coupled with globalization issues in education, Quality Assurance (QA) in education has drawn concerns from governments, industry and other stakeholders in international education. A number of QA procedures have been presented by regulatory bodies of various nationalities. As a result of the observed disparity between the high population of school age youth in Nigeria and the inadequate educational resources, coupled with the low level integration of Information Technology (IT) tools in administration of education in the country, QA in education has not been fully achieved. It is of the view that except conscious and serious effort is made to develop environment specific technologies to deploy IT tools in educational administration, manual procedures for pursuing QA programmes may not yield desirable results. In this study, a model for building a system that can be used to evaluate the performance of academic programmes to determine level of compliance to Minimum Acceptable Standards (MAS) set by the appropriate regulatory bodies is provided with the architectural framework for building the performance evaluation system.