Quality assurance and accreditation are closely tied together. This article documents the work toward a unified and comprehensive national accreditation program in health education. By exploring the accreditation journey of another discipline, the field of gerontology should learn valuable lessons. These include an attention to inclusivity, a…

This paper suggests that when a course is planned within one culture for delivery to members of another culture, appropriate quality control of assessment becomes an issue of major proportions. Based on their experience of presenting an Aid Agency-funded Masters course in a developing country in the Pacific, the authors describe the processes to…

There are increasing demands for higher levels of data assurance in higher education. This paper explores some of the drivers for this trend, and then explains what stakeholders mean by the concept of data assurance, since this has not been well defined previously. The paper captures insights from existing literature, stakeholders, auditors, and…

Programme evaluation is essential for quality assurance in education. In this paper, we describe our evaluation strategy for the first year of a new medical programme. Although we used multiple methods in the evaluation, the use of the focus group method was core. This paper reports our experiences of focus groups for this purpose. We describe the…

The European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) realises that there is a steadily growing interest among students and all stakeholders of Higher Education and the public at large in accessing detailed and reliable information on the quality of individual study programmes, faculties and higher education institutions. ENQA…

The concept of "wicked issues", originally developed in the field of urban planning, has been taken up by design educators, architects and public health academics where the means for handling "wicked issues" has been developed through "reflective practice". In the education of teachers, whilst reflective practice has…

While Australian teacher education programs have long had rigorous accreditation pathways at the University level they have not been subject to the same formal public or professional scrutiny typical of professions such as medicine, nursing or engineering. Professional accreditation for teacher preparation programs is relatively new and is linked…

A diverse society has created a diverse education system, which in turn requires diverse and complex mechanisms of quality control. The diversity and complexity of the industrial, service, and knowledge-based economy, with its vast variety of occupations and dynamic labor markets, heavily influences the curricular structures and academic profiles…

This paper clarifies the problems of meaning and translation into practice of concepts of "quality" in higher education by examining a quality improvement program at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). The paper notes that Australian government agencies have advanced a quality assurance (QA) approach concerned with the…

A taxonomy of potential values conflicts in evaluations is presented. Basis is the distinction of types of conflict (aims vs. means conflicts; qualitative vs. quantitative conflicts). Six areas of values are discussed: the ethical, methodical, social and interactive, legal, economic, and personal values. The taxonomy of conflicts between these…