HE-Q01 — Quality Assurance in Higher Education

Course Code: HE-Q01  |  School: School of Higher Education  |  Cluster: Quality Assurance

Level: Intermediate  |  Estimated duration: 6 weeks (approximately 40 hours)  |  Language: English  |  Certificate: Professional Certificate (non-degree)  |  Format: Self-paced with AI support under human supervision

Overview

Quality assurance is now a permanent feature of higher education systems worldwide, and it is also one of the most contested. Its defenders argue that it protects students and public money in an era of mass participation and cross-border provision. Its critics argue that it has produced an audit apparatus that consumes academic time, rewards documentation over substance, and measures what is easy rather than what matters. This course takes both positions seriously.

The intellectual spine is the distinction between the several things the word quality is asked to carry: exceptional standard, consistency, fitness for purpose, value for money and transformation. Harvey and Green’s taxonomy of these conceptions remains the sharpest available tool for exposing what a given quality system is actually doing, and learners will use it repeatedly to dissect real quality frameworks from European, North American and Southeast Asian systems.

Practically, the course builds the capability to design an internal quality system that a working academic department would recognise as useful. Learners specify quality indicators, design the evidence flow, plan the review cycle, and confront directly the phenomenon Michael Power called the audit society: the tendency of verification systems to reshape the activity they verify.

Learning outcomes

On completion, a successful learner will be able to:

1. Differentiate the principal conceptions of quality and identify which is operationalised by a given quality assurance framework.
2. Compare the architecture of national quality assurance systems and explain how regulatory context shapes institutional behaviour.
3. Distinguish internal quality assurance, external quality assurance and quality enhancement, and describe their proper relationship.
4. Select and justify quality indicators, and explain the gaming behaviour each indicator is likely to induce.
5. Design an internal quality assurance cycle with defined evidence, ownership and decision points.
6. Critically assess the audit-society critique and its implications for the design of proportionate quality systems.
7. Advise institutional leadership on quality strategy in terms that account for both compliance obligation and academic legitimacy.

Who this course is for

Quality assurance officers, registrars, deans, programme leaders, institutional researchers, staff of national quality agencies, and academics who serve on quality committees or peer review panels.

Prerequisites

No formal prerequisites. Some familiarity with how a university programme is approved and monitored will make the material more immediately useful.

Syllabus

Module 1 — What Quality Means and Who Decides

The word quality functions in higher education as a container for incompatible commitments, and quality systems typically enact one conception while claiming another. This module makes those commitments visible.

Lessons. 1.1 Harvey and Green’s five conceptions of quality  ·  1.2 Standards, thresholds and the problem of comparability  ·  1.3 Stakeholder conflict: students, employers, states and academics  ·  1.4 Diagnosing the operative conception in a real quality framework

Deliverable. A diagnostic note dissecting one published quality framework and naming the conception of quality it actually enforces.

Module 2 — National Systems and Regulatory Architecture

Quality assurance systems differ profoundly in whether they accredit institutions or programmes, whether they are state or peer controlled, and whether their sanction is funding or reputation. The module compares them structurally rather than descriptively.

Lessons. 2.1 The European Standards and Guidelines and the Bologna architecture  ·  2.2 Regional and programmatic accreditation in the United States  ·  2.3 AUN-QA and Southeast Asian regional convergence  ·  2.4 Regulatory intensity and its behavioural consequences

Deliverable. An analytical brief comparing two national quality systems and predicting the institutional behaviour each will produce.

Module 3 — Designing Internal Quality Assurance

External requirements are satisfied by internal systems, and the design of those systems determines whether quality work generates insight or paperwork. This module builds the internal cycle.

Lessons. 3.1 Programme approval, monitoring, review and closure  ·  3.2 Committee architecture, ownership and decision rights  ·  3.3 Documentation: the minimum that is genuinely evidential  ·  3.4 Aligning internal cycles with external review timetables

Deliverable. A design artefact: a complete internal quality assurance cycle for one faculty, with roles, evidence and decision points specified.

Module 4 — Indicators, Metrics and Their Distortions

Every indicator adopted becomes a target and therefore ceases to be a neutral measure. This module treats indicator selection as a strategic act with predictable side effects.

Lessons. 4.1 Input, process, output and outcome indicators  ·  4.2 Goodhart’s law and gaming in higher education settings  ·  4.3 Student satisfaction: what it measures and what it does not  ·  4.4 Constructing a balanced indicator set with declared limitations

Deliverable. An evaluation report proposing an indicator set and specifying, for each indicator, the gaming behaviour it will invite and the counter-measure.

Module 5 — The Audit Critique and Proportionate Assurance

Michael Power’s account of verification rituals and Jethro Newton’s fieldwork on academics’ perceptions together explain why quality systems are so widely resented. The module uses the critique constructively, to design lighter systems that still assure.

Lessons. 5.1 The audit society and rituals of verification  ·  5.2 Compliance cultures and the decoupling of practice from documentation  ·  5.3 Risk-based and proportionate approaches to assurance  ·  5.4 Shifting from assurance to enhancement without losing accountability

Deliverable. An implementation plan reducing the documentary burden of an existing quality process by at least one third while preserving its evidential function.

Module 6 — Capstone: An Institutional Quality Strategy

The capstone integrates conception, regulatory context, internal architecture, indicators and proportionality into a strategy document addressed to a senior team. It is assessed as a professional deliverable.

Lessons. 6.1 Establishing the regulatory and institutional baseline  ·  6.2 Specifying the quality architecture  ·  6.3 Defining indicators and evidence flows  ·  6.4 Writing for governing bodies

Deliverable. A 2,500-word internal quality assurance strategy for one named institution, including architecture, indicator set, review cycle and a proportionality argument.

Assessment

Pass mark 70 per cent. All assessed components must be attempted. Every mark in this course is issued by a human assessor; no assessment outcome is generated automatically.

Rubric criteria

Each assessed artefact is marked against four criteria at four levels (distinction, pass with merit, pass, fail).

1. Conceptual precision. Conceptions of quality are distinguished rigorously and applied consistently throughout.
2. Systems reasoning. The relationship between regulatory context, institutional design and academic behaviour is analysed rather than asserted.
3. Practicability. The proposed architecture could be operated by the staff and resources available.
4. Critical balance. The audit critique is engaged seriously without collapsing into either compliance or dismissal.

Reading list

Core. Harvey, L. and Green, D. (1993) ‘Defining Quality’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 18(1), pp. 9–34.

• ENQA (2015) Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). Brussels: EURASHE, ESU, EUA and ENQA.
• Power, M. (1997) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Westerheijden, D. F., Stensaker, B. and Rosa, M. J. (eds.) (2007) Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Trends in Regulation, Translation and Transformation. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Dill, D. D. and Beerkens, M. (eds.) (2010) Public Policy for Academic Quality: Analyses of Innovative Policy Instruments. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Newton, J. (2000) ‘Feeding the Beast or Improving Quality? Academics’ Perceptions of Quality Assurance and Quality Monitoring’, Quality in Higher Education, 6(2), pp. 153–163.

Academic integrity and use of AI

Generative AI may be used in this course as a drafting, translation and critique aid, and its use must be disclosed. Every submission carries a short use-of-AI statement naming the tools used, the tasks they performed and the checks the learner applied to the output. Using AI to fabricate data, invent sources, impersonate an interview participant, or produce an artefact the learner cannot explain in a live viva is prohibited.

All citations are verified before submission; a reference that cannot be located by the assessor is treated as fabricated. Fabrication, plagiarism and undisclosed ghost-authorship result in failure of the component and referral to the academic integrity panel. Marks in this course are issued by human assessors, and any learner may be asked to defend a submission orally before a mark is confirmed.