At the end of 2010 the Durban University of Technology initiated a Curriculum Renewal Project, central to which is the aspiration to become a student centred university through the transformation of teaching and learning and the promotion of quality enhancement. However, the current realities for curriculum development and quality assurance at the…

Wenger (2000, 229) describes communities of practice as the "basic building blocks of a social learning system" since they are the "social containers" that make up such a system. By practising in academic communities, academics define with one another what constitutes academic competence and, for that matter, what constitutes…

This article examines notions of quality and quality assurance in higher education. It does this by raising questions such as whether quality in higher education is the same as, for example, quality of clothing or the quality of meat in local butcheries. The article questions the assumption that if certain things, such as criteria or…

Quality assurance in higher education has a bearing on the policies, systems and processes directed at ensuring the quality of education provision in an institution (HEQC 1996, 14). To ensure a striving for excellence in academic programmes in a Faculty, to determine the extent to which this striving is achieved and to promote development and…

This article looks at the way in which people perceive learning and the impact of these perceptions on teaching methods within the context of learning development in distance education. The context could, in fact, be any type of teaching and learning environment. The point is to balance approaches to teaching and learning depending on student…

For the African Virtual University and its consortium of African universities the implementation of quality promoting initiatives are not without challenges and scepticisms. To be discussed in this article is the case of a teacher education qualification in ten different African countries. Seven countries were sampled and visited in 2006 with the…

The birth of democracy in South Africa resulted in the mammoth task of transforming the higher education sector. Policies, structures, procedures and processes underwent a review that hoped to align the system with the needs of the wider population of the country. Among other strategies that are used for this process are quality assurance…

The Council for Higher Educations' (CHE) Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) requires internal quality evaluations to be performed on the various programmes offered by the Faculty before visitation by the HEQC. This article examines some of the challenges and processes followed by six of the departments of Walter Sisulu University's Faculty…

The evaluation of educational or social programmes is paramount for establishing success or impact in higher education. Evaluation questions about programme goals (e.g. better performance of first-year students) or about the quality of programme strategies (design and implementation) and effectiveness of delivery (coordinator inputs and…

In this article I point out that prominence given to higher education quality assurance by contemporary states might be viewed in the context of the ascendance of neoliberalism over the past few decades and a concomitant culture of performativity. However, I argue for a shift in the angle of vision on performativity and quality assurance through a…

The curriculum should be paramount in the academic field since the university uses curricula to put its ideas into effect. The curriculum field and community engagement are both comprehensive at universities but research on curricular community engagement (CCE) is imperative. Curriculum theory was used as a theoretical framework for this article,…

This essay addresses the question, "What is quality in higher education?" In so doing it raises many interesting and vexing questions in relation to education. For example, is "quality" in higher education the same as, for example, "quality" with reference to the quality of clothing or the quality of meat in local…

Policy formulation and implementation is a highly contested domain within the South African Higher Education landscape. This contestation can be attributed to the lack of wide stakeholder involvement and the architecture of the policy-making process. The contestation is also born of an absence of a systemic monitoring and evaluation mechanism to…

The article addresses the concept of quality assurance (QA) and its relation to quality in higher education which itself is a component of total quality management. It then examines the regulatory policies for higher education followed by the meaning of the concept of democracy in the South African Constitution and its impact and implications on…

The presently reported part of the study gathered data on the academics' perceptions on quality in higher education (QHE) and investigated the general quality promotion (QP), quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC) and quality management (QM) strategies in the institutional level of a historically developing university (HDU), its Faculty of…