The present report follows an ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) Workshop on Quality Assurance and Postgraduate Education, hosted by the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS) in Brasov, Romania on 12-13 March 2009. The workshop was an excellent opportunity for ENQA members to exchange…

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA…

Quality assurance of teacher training has become of a great concern nowadays. This paper addresses the quality of BEd programme of the University of Education (UE) Lahore. The main purpose of the study was to evaluate the quality of BEd programme with regard to the internal efficiency of Government Colleges for Elementary Teachers (GCETs), the…

This article reports findings from 39 interviews from two Hong Kong universities and offers a critique of the RAE system. Respondents stated that the main emphasis in counting research productivity was on articles in prestigious international journals. There were many negative comments about this as the main quality indicator. Some respondents…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of understanding between an Australian university and its offshore partner institution, on quality assurance. It attempts to highlight the dynamics of quality assurance policy implementation within and across institutions for an offshore degree. Design/methodology/approach: The study used…

Purpose: The quality of an education system or a comparative international assessment refers more and more to quantitative parameters, i.e. "educational indicators." The paper aims to analyse the structure of several educational indicators and indicator systems and answer the question "What can educational indicators achieve?"…

Set within the market-driven context in educare for young children in Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, this paper points to the importance of exploring the definitions of quality in early childhood programmes from the multiple perspectives of school stakeholders. This study describes two preschools that…

The quality of care offered in four different types of non-parental child care to 307 infants at 10 months old and 331 infants at 18 months old was compared and factors associated with higher quality were identified. Observed quality was lowest in nurseries at each age point, except that at 18 months they offered more learning activities. There…

The role and function of external quality assurance is of great importance for the development of an internal quality culture in higher education. Research has shown that external quality assurance can stimulate but also create obstacles for institutional improvement. To strike a balance between improvement and accountability is, therefore, a key…

This study applies the "Personnel Evaluation Standards" of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation to the procedures, practices, and related components of a school's staff evaluation program to determine the program's effectiveness. Evaluators sought answers to questions including the extent to which the intended structures and…

An all-volunteer organization called the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), headquartered in Taiwan, was initially designed to translate open source materials from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese. Given the recent plethora of open educational resources (OER), such as the OCW, the growing use of such resources by the…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the processes that can be and have been adopted by UK business schools as they attempt to meet the Quality Assurance Agency's concern with the standard of quality management and enhancement. Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature provides interpretations of quality,…

Romania is reforming its Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system and introducing a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and a National Quality Assurance Framework (NQAF) to create a new and comprehensive national quality assurance system for qualifications. These reforms have their origins in the social and economic…

The paper proposes a metric, the research quality index (RQI), for assessing and tracking university research quality. The RQI is a composite index that encompasses the three main areas of research activity: publications, research grants and higher degree by research activity. The public availability of such an index will also facilitate…