Quality Improvement In Higher Education Research Articles

Improving Response Rates to an Alumni Survey in East Africa

Feedback from students and graduates is essential to inform ongoing quality improvement in higher education. However, African universities often face implementation issues in alumni surveys, including technological barriers and difficulties in tracking graduates, particularly those from earlier cohorts and rural alumni. Innovative strategies are needed to locate alumni and obtain a good response rate across widely dispersed, rural and remote areas. This paper reports on strategies used to increase response rates in an East African online alumni survey in a context of limited computer/Internet access. The survey aimed to assess the impact of nursing graduates over a 15 year period (2001–2016). Strategies focused on locating and communicating with graduates and providing solutions to barriers associated with computer/Internet access. Better engagement with alumni was achieved using mobile technologies and social media networks. Facilitating access to online surveys by taking technology to alumni or providing hubs for online access encouraged survey participation. The strategies discussed in this study are particularly relevant for clustered or networked alumni populations (e.g. nurses) in low income and limited resource settings.

Study on the Integration Mode of Computer Network Technology and College English Curriculum

Teachers suffer from educating while students struggle with examination. College English teaching is too time-consuming and inefficient. These have been topics of concern and interest in the reform of college English teaching and learning in China. With the large expansion of the number of universities, the shortage of teaching resources has reached a bottleneck of the quality improvement of higher education in China. In the face of such a dilemma, the integration of computer network technology and curriculum teaching and the realization of the efficient integration of limited resources are an effective way to solve the pressing challenge. In this paper, the problems and advantages of the integrated mode of computer network technology and college English curriculum are discussed.

중국과 인도의 정부주도 고등교육 질 개선 프로젝트 분석

중국과 인도의 정부주도 고등교육 질 개선 프로젝트 분석

Education for Sustainable Development: a Strategic Tool for Quality Improvement of Higher Education

It has been long known that quality assurance (QA) is a system to develop quality standards in Thailand. However, it is not easy to implement the concept throughout a whole organization, for example, to include in a university, faculty members, program specifications, management team, and so on. This paper is to explain a case of strategic management of quality assurance using education for sustainable development (ESD) in the university with social enterprise concept. An example of the university with the mission statement of “to serve society” can drawn more attention using ESD concept to faculty in stead of QA regulation concept. The conceptual framework of the implementation was shown how QA can be developed in curriculum embedding with an ESD concept.

The role of spirituality and ethics in higher education quality improvement

The role of spirituality and ethics in higher education quality improvement

The Improvement of Higher Education Quality and Talent-Nurturing with Scientific Students' Association (SSA) Commitment

In the article, I interpreted talent-nurturing as a key process of managing the quality of higher education and analyzed the Scientific Students' Association as a tool for successfully nurturing talents. By using analytical statistical methods, I showed which reasons motivate our students to join the Scientific Students' Association, and if those who participate in this particular form of university talent-nurturing share any common features or characteristics. Based on the results, I proposed quality improvement suggestions, which can increase the number of students that join formal talent-nurturing programs, thus, becoming more valuable for all higher education institutions.

Making medical student course evaluations meaningful: implementation of an intensive course review protocol.

BackgroundOngoing course evaluation is a key component of quality improvement in higher education. The complexities associated with delivering high quality medical education programs involving multiple lecturers can make course and instructor evaluation challenging. We describe the implementation and evaluation of an “intensive course review protocol” in an undergraduate medical programMethodsWe examined pre-clerkship courses from 2006 to 2011 - prior to and following protocol implementation. Our non-parametric analysis included Mann-Whitney U tests to compare the 2006/07 and 2010/11 academic years.ResultsWe included 30 courses in our analysis. In the 2006/07 academic year, 13/30 courses (43.3 %) did not meet the minimum benchmark and were put under intensive review. By 2010/11, only 3/30 courses (10.0 %) were still below the minimum benchmark. Compared to 2006/07, courses ratings in the 2010/11 year were significantly higher (p = 0.004). However, during the study period mean response rates fell from 76.5 % in 2006/07 to 49.7 % in 2010/11.ConclusionThese results suggest an intensive course review protocol can have a significant impact on pre-clerkship course ratings in an undergraduate medical program. Reductions in survey response rates represent an ongoing challenge in the interpretation of student feedback.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12909-015-0387-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Content and Formation of Key Competencies of Managers' Education

<p><em>The article considers the issues of further improvement of higher education quality through training of managerial staff of higher education institutions and their reserves for the effective organization of the educational process, development of their knowledge, skills and habits in the training course “Education quality management”. The course allows listeners to improve their professional skills in accordance with the requirements of the management activities necessary to achieve the quality of higher education, to develop new professional managerial knowledge, skills and habits and related competencies as well. </em></p>

The Application Strategic Planning and Balance Scorecard Modelling in Enhance of Higher Education

In the past few years, many models and approaches to quality improvement experienced in commercial organizations, such as total quality management, continuous improvement and EFQM model have been accepted and used by universities and other research and educational institutions and the results also have been used effectively. Strategic Planning and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) model are also among the approaches and models that deals with planning and performance assessment of organizations and corporates with a great broad vision. But some questions are raised here: How these two approaches make enhance the quality of universities and higher education institutions? Is it as much useful for organizations and commercial institutions as it is for higher education institutions and universities? What are the necessary requirements and infrastructures for deployment and implementation of these two approaches in higher education institutions? And whether they really are used in higher education. This is a descriptive research which aims at answering the above questions concerning the application of strategic planning models and balanced scorecard in higher education quality improvement.

The Impact of International Student Mobility on Subsequent Employment and Professional Career: A Large-scale Survey among Polish Former Erasmus Students

The Erasmus programme contributes to quality improvement in higher education at 3 levels: system (policy), institutional, and individual, and thus enhances employability of university graduates who have taken part in Erasmus mobility. This paper aims to present selected results of a large-scale empirical study on the impact of international student mobility on subsequent employability and professional career. We addressed our questionnaire to 14705 Polish alumni, including all Erasmus programme participants in 2007 and 2008. We have received 2450 completed questionnaires. As the survey was conducted in 2012, the respondents could report their professional career over 5-6 years after the return from a study period abroad. Only 1.6% of the former international student mobility participants mentioned they had never worked, with a vast majority having a white-collar job or even a managerial position. As much as 68.6% reported they had ever worked abroad. We wanted our respondents to estimate the importance of selected factors for their career development and job position. Higher education and proficiency in foreign languages were judged very important by the majority of our study subjects. 1/3 of former international student mobility participants considered international experience to have a very important influence on their professional development and position.

HIGHER EDUCATION EVALUATION IN GERMANY

The article deals with the problem of higher education evaluation in Germany which is an important component ofthis type of education. The principles of evaluation in the field of higher education have been defined and characterisedand are as follow: discursiveness, diversity of perspectives and process-orientation. The key stages of evaluation in ahigher educational institution have been highlighted and described, in particular, self- evaluation, external evaluation andapplying the results of the external and internal evaluation to practice. The differences in such notions as “ evaluation “and “accreditation” have also been identified. Though evaluation and accreditation have the same methods and assessmentcriteria, their goals are different. evaluation is focused on quality improvement in higher education and enables todevelop a strategy to achieve that goal, while accreditation simply indicates compliance with the minimum standards andrequirements at the time of inspection. In addition to that, it has been found that accreditation is conducted on the basisof evaluation results. The article also describes the activity of German accreditation agencies and accreditation typeswhich are programme, cluster, institutional and systematic ones. It has been found that one of the areas of evaluation inGerman higher education is ranking of higher educational institutions. Moreover, the research offers the analysis of theranking system, which is adopted by The Centre of Development of Higher Educational Institutions in Germany, and givescharacteristics to opportunities and educational conditions related to academic subjects and research activities conditions aswell as assesses bachelor courses in the light of graduates’ further employment opportunities.

Evaluating the success of educational policy in Mexican Higher Education

State support in higher education (HE) is often justified on the grounds that HE is important for the development of the country. However, little analysis is normally done in order to assess the impact of education quality initiatives. The Mexican government has been engaging in a policy of HE quality improvement that can be traced to 1989. In this paper we use data from the period 2007–2010, when the various quality programmes were in action, in order to see if, on the basis of public information, it is possible to trace their impact on Federal, State, and Private Universities in Mexico. The technical approach is based on Multivariate Statistical Analysis, particularly in Ordinal Multidimensional Scaling. It was found that, during the period studied, the performance indicators used in this study show a general quality improvement in Mexican HE, and that this improvement has extended to both the State and the Private sectors. Whether this improvement is just in the data or it is real, we cannot say using published data.

Role of E-Learning in the Quality Improvement of Higher Education

Education is a light that shows the mankind the right direction to surge. The purpose of education is not just making a student literate but adds rationale thinking, knowledgeable and self sufficiency. E-learning holds particular relevance to India as the youth constitute its major population and there is no other way to take education in such a scale without the intervention of technology. ELearning includes all the forms of electronically supported learning and teaching including Edutech. In e – learning the instructional material and content may be delivered by any one of all electronic media including the internet, intranet, extranet, LAN, Satellite broad costs, audio video tapes. All lessons can be learned in just one click. Teachers who are giving online lectures are real with vast experiences, without going to school, without spending single rupee for enrollment that is the wisest thing to do if we are not financially equipped. ELearning can be divided in several different types. They are Web-supplemented courses, Web-dependent courses In Mixed Mode courses etc. ELearning Approaches are, Computer-Based Learning, Computer Based Trainings, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Technology Enhanced learning, etc. Communication technologies are generally categorized as asynchronous or synchronous. Asynchronous activities use technologies such as blogs, wikis, and discussion boards. Synchronous activities involve the exchange of ideas and information with one or more participants during the same period of time. Learning management system and learning content management system is software used for delivering tracking the managing training education Luskin says that the “e” should be interpreted to mean exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, emotional, extended, excellent, and educational in addition to “electronic” that is a traditional national interpretation. This broader interpretation allows for 21 century applications for the improvement of Higher Education. Rapid changes in the technologies are indicating that the role of E-learning in future will grow tremendously in education.

Implementação de novas práticas pedagógicas no Ensino Superior

A implementação de paradigmas no Ensino Superior resultantes da introdução do Processo de Bolonha abre portas para a renovação. A qualidade passa pela revisão dos curricula, pela reorganização dos processos de ensino-aprendizagem, pela estruturação das unidades curriculares ecursos, pela qualificação e formação de docentes, pelo sucesso e resultados escolares, pela avaliação das competências atingidas e pela confiança social no Ensino Superior. Em 2010, foi delineado o Projeto "Construção da Aprendizagem" (ConstAp) com o objetivo principal de motivar as mudanças, nomeadamente ao nível das metodologias adotadas e da implementação do trabalho autónomo, para garantir uma carga de trabalho do estudante contínua ao longo do semestre. A questão central é a melhoria da qualidade no ensino ministrado. Este artigo analisa a execução do projeto implementado no IPCB, desde o ano letivo 2009/10, no âmbito do Processo de Bolonha, contextualizando os seus objetivos, implementação e condicionantes.Palavras-chaveConstAp; ECTS; Ensino-aprendizagem; Trabalho autónomo

Towards Accreditation in Higher Education : A Case Study of Jazan Community College ( JCC ) , KSA

Academic quality improvement in higher education has recently been considered in many universities over the world. The quality of education in the newly established universities has been regulated through the process of accreditation, which is a state policy tool with multiple and sometimes competing purposes. The purpose of the present paper was to provide an overview of accreditation activities in Jazan Community College (JCC) in order to reveal achievements, deficiencies and trends. The paper investigated the management system prior to adopting the accreditation system and reviewed the implementation process.

EXPLORING ROLE OF MANAGEMENT IN QUALITY ASSURANCE AT PRIVATE AND STATE UNIVERSITIES OF GEORGIA

Today Georgia as never before faces challenges of quality assurance. Despite reforms carried out by the Georgian government aiming at the quality improvement of higher education, many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the country still faces real problems. The concept of “management” is not so widely known, not to say anything about the lack of human resources with theoretical knowledge and experience in education management. The purpose of the research was to analyze universities management in general terms and identify how quality-oriented universities’ management is in Georgia. For this purpose quantitative research was carried out. The universities were selected according to their legal status, period of functionality and qualitative experience. By combining certain data we elaborated indicators for the purpose of comparing various aspects of universities. For ensuring validity criteria validity was applied. Results of the research show that management is the main pre-requisite for quality assurance. Drawbacks and gaps in university management have also been identified the improvement of which will make a basis for enhancing management quality and establish a management culture at the Universities of Georgia. Key words: quality management, quality assurance, HEI’s management.

Conceptualising quality improvement in higher education: policy, theory and practice for outcomes based learning in Hong Kong

‘Policy borrowing’ continues to be an important factor in the construction of higher education policy in East Asia. Many post-colonial societies have continued to look to the West for models that will assist them to reengineer their universities in the quest for creating world class institutions. Against this background, Hong Kong's University Grants Committee adopted an outcomes based approach to teaching and learning in 2005 and gained support from institutions under its responsibility for doing so. Supported with ample resources, the subject of numerous public symposia and incorporated into regular quality audit assessments, outcomes based approaches to teaching and learning are in the process of becoming part of Hong Kong's distinctive approach to quality reform in higher education. This paper reviews the policy context in which this initiative emerged, analyses the policy meaning in terms of its underlying theories and derives a set of principles that could guide the implementation of outcomes based approaches. The multiple possibilities associated with outcomes based teaching and learning demonstrate how systemic reform agendas are subject to interpretation and local adaptation.

Evaluation of quality of education in higher education based on Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) Model

Academic quality improvement in higher education has recently been considered in many universities over the world. Aim of the study was investigating quality of medical records courses in 4 medical universities and comparing them according to9 dimensions of AQIP model. Selected university consisted of Isfahan, ShahidBeheshti, Tehran and Iran. Participants of this study comprised academic staff, graduate students as well as scientific board members. All four universities were relatively favorable in 9 dimensions and there is not any difference among them. But there is difference between view point of students and scientific board members.

Responding to the student voice: a case study of a systematic improvement strategy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of collecting and acting on student feedback as a key component of quality improvement in higher education. The paper seeks to outline a systematic improvement strategy adopted at a faculty level within a large university in Australia but will be of interest to leaders and practitioners of quality assurance programmes across the sector.Design/methodology/approachA strategy to achieve quality improvement was designed and carried out jointly by the University Centre for Higher Education Quality (CHEQ) and the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (CALT) with staff in one of the smaller faculties at the University. The faculty mean for student satisfaction lagged significantly below the means of other faculties, and five units (subjects) which were deemed to be “poorly performing” against the University's agreed target were selected for some intensive improvement. The guiding principles which underpinned the adopted strategy included: utilising student feedback data; targeting poorly performing units as a priority; linking staff and student development support; and documenting and demonstrating improvement as a consequence of the actions taken.FindingsA post‐test evaluation of the five target units showed improvement in the form of increased student satisfaction. The strategy adopted at the University underlined the significance of collecting student feedback in quality enhancement, acting on the feedback and supporting academic staff in implementing improvements. Overall, the strategy signalled the interconnection between student evaluations and the quality of education programmes.Practical implicationsThe successful implementation of a unit improvement strategy at a faculty level within the University demonstrated the value of the approach and recommended its application as an improvement strategy across the whole institution, provided that the internal context of individual faculties is taken into consideration. This case study may also offer some guidance to other tertiary institutions looking into utilising evidence‐based planning and decision making as a way of driving quality improvement.Originality/valueMany tertiary institutions around the world are currently collecting student feedback. However, the interconnection between the student feedback and actual institutional change is not always evident or addressed. Therefore, this University case study offers some direction towards a more effective utilisation of student evaluation data.

Service quality in higher education

Quality experts believe that, ‘measuring customer satisfaction at an educational establishment might be regarded by educators as one of the greatest challenges of the quality movement’ (Cloutier & Richards, 1994, p. 117). This challenge is only one of several that surround quality improvement efforts in higher education. This paper focuses on identifying and evaluating techniques used to take on the challenges of quality improvement in higher education. This paper also examines two primary difficulties: first, definition of the customer; and second, measuring customer quality perceptions. An examination of representative historical applications of quality techniques was conducted as well as identification of the differences and similarities surrounding quality improvement efforts in each of three service areas typically found in higher education: academic, administrative, and auxiliary functions. While recognising these higher education areas differ from the typical business environment, positive research findings on the application of quality techniques for these areas were discovered.