Preliminary Research on the Construction of Education Quality Assurance System of the Open Universities

Abstract

The open universities are new things in the process of China’s higher education development. Its development depends on the quality. The construction of education quality assurance system is both the bottleneck of modern distance education development and the challenge facing the development of the open universities. The development of modern distance education has distinctive stage characteristics, with government-led quality management features and deep quality assurance bottleneck. Guaranteeing and improving the education quality of the open universities needs to resort to the scientific and rational view of the education quality and to improve the external evaluation mechanism of combining the government, thirdparty organization and society as well as the internal teaching quality assurance system. KEYWORD: Open University; education quality assurance system; modern distance education; assessment International Conference on Social Science, Education Management and Sports Education (SSEMSE 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 1429 annual report and inspection every year. In addition, the government performs its monitoring and management functions through the establishment of the Central Radio & TV University system and the implementation quality of modern distance education project. In recent years, in order to enhance the quality of distance higher education, the State established the off-campus study service system (such as the establishment of digital learning harbour and demonstration learning centre, etc.). Based on a series of quality assurance activities, China has established an organization system with certain quality assurance functions in the field of distance education quality assurance. However, because the quality assurance system of distance education is not perfect yet, the recognition of quality and management mechanism still needs to improve [3]. 2.2 Quality Anomie: the Bottleneck Restricting Distance Education Development Compared with ordinary universities, the implementation of open education in the Central Radio & TV University and the ordinary university network institute enjoys more school-running autonomy. Although the government gave school runners more autonomous rights, it did not conduct scientific norms and proper guidance according to the market rule, so that the external promotion system of China’s open distance education quality has the problems such as “lack of the external promotion system of education quality matching market-oriented school-running and failure of the traditional education quality promotion system” [4], which ultimately led to that the core issue-the quality of education was likely to be ignored and had the danger of being marginalized in the context that marketization had an impact on higher education. In addition, the government-led centralization security system lacks monitoring mechanisms and transparency, quality assurance system is not perfect, and quality assurance lacks reutilization, resulting in the absence of “the inherent self-restraint mechanism of teaching quality. [5]” An important manifestation of the absence of the inherent self-restraint mechanism is to ignore the dominant position of “learners”. As the most important stakeholders of open distance education, learners' interests and willingness to participate in the school quality management and supervision should be met. Learners’ participation in school quality supervision could not be just a mere formality or just stay at the conceptual level. Learners should directly involve in the quality assurance system and form part of the quality assurance [6]. 3 CONSTRUCTION OF EDUCATION QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEM DETERMINES THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OPEN UNIVERSITIES 3.1 Significance of Construction of Quality Assurance System The open universities are importantly innovative form of higher education, and have all the factors of higher education teaching. Quality assurance in education is a node of the entire closed teaching loop, and cannot be lacked. Quality assurance in teaching, together with diverse means of control and supervision, quality assurance strategy and related factors, constitutes the unified whole of the open universities [7]. Quality assurance system is composed of internal quality assurance and external quality assurance. According to the system theory, “the system, as a whole, has some new characteristics which do not exist in its constituents.” As a complex system, the construction of education quality assurance system of the open universities should take into account both internal and external systems, either of which cannot be neglected. Distance education factors determine that teachers and students are in the state of spatial and temporal separation. The professionalism and learning habits of each learner are quite different, so the education quality assurance of the open universities has the characteristics of multilevel, multi-agency, multi-interference and distortion [8]. 3.2 Current Situation of Education Quality Assurance of the Open Universities At present, although China has initially established a quality assurance system of higher education, the quality assurance system construction of open distance education has “deficiencies”. The main problems are as follows [9]: quality assurance subject and the evaluation subject are single, there is a lack of professional evaluation institutions and personnel, and social group participation is not high; evaluation tools and methods are not scientific; the quality environment is not standardized, and quality culture construction is ignored; the contradiction between the vigorous development of the quality assurance activities and the lagged construction of related laws and regulations is increasingly prominent. Among these problems, the most pressing one is undoubtedly the absence of education quality monitoring system. Higher education quality monitoring system puts too much emphasis on the central government’s dominance, and lacks the effective social evaluation and evaluation of the third party organization as well as appropriate quality control standards. In addition, “the education quality monitoring system within the schools is not perfect,