Parks and recreation professionals must recognize potential hazards in playground design, installation, and maintenance. Current safety risks are from older equipment that does not comply with modern standards and has not been safety inspected. The National Playground Safety Institute's certification program is an important step toward reliable…

An annotated bibliography on quality assurance in higher education around the world includes 35 books and World Wide Web sites, noting content, extent of information available, and in some cases background information. (MSE)

Reports on a five-year ethnographic, longitudinal study of a British higher education college during a process of change in quality assurance. Identifies tensions experienced during the process and stresses the influence of context, the unpredictability of change, and the lack of simple prescriptions for managing change projects. (DB)

This collection of seven articles examines the issue of playground safety, focusing on recent trends and mandates in playground safety; treated wood on playgrounds; safe playgrounds for infants and toddlers; achieving a safe ratio of adults to children; soft contained playgrounds; certified playground-safety inspectors; and playground injuries in…

Review of 205 continuing medical education (CME) websites found the following: most university sites offered only class schedules; far more commercial sites than university sites offered online CME content; 60-80% of content met quality control standards; only 10% of sites provided information on peer review of content. (SK)

Demonstration programs and social experiments are often subject to sophisticated, controlled evaluations. An important factor that is not subject to control, and sometimes even goes unobserved, is overall program site quality. Site quality can be observed in process evaluations, but these tend to be expensive. This paper describes an alternative…

A model of production and exchange is proposed as an alternative to both market-oriented policy and social welfare policy. New patterns of social coordination at work form the basis for a new form of production output value: conducive value. This value is developed in both workers and consumers, activates skills and capabilities, and transforms…

The evolution of Chilean assessment of higher education institutions is described and analysed. Focus is put on a systemic description of assessment subjects, so that different evaluation approaches can be compared. This paper stresses the relevance of the quality assurance approach, which has been taken as a model for the now oncoming…

Quality is the central element of the results of changes happening in Hungarian higher education, which is serving an ever-increasing number of students. Following the transition to capitalism, as the number of students greatly increases, the direct control of higher education by the government ceases, and especially because of the "mass…

For the past two years, accredited learning has been made accessible to over 40 voluntary and community organisations through a sub-regional partnership of the Central London Learning and Skills Council, six London boroughs, representatives from further and higher education, and the authors' organisation--the London Open College Network (LOCN).…

Purpose: To provide a view of quality in accounting education from the perspective of a critical stakeholder group--academic accountants. The identification of this view adds to the growing discussions around quality, and how it is assured in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: Applying a framework for defining quality in higher…

In recent years, numerous studies in the field of service quality have been carried out. However, relatively few studies have addressed the specific context of higher education. The purpose of this study has been to examine what dimensions constitute quality in higher education and to compare these with the dimensions of quality that have been…

Higher education in Flanders has seen some major changes in the 1990s. One of the key elements of the new higher education regulations was the quality assessment system. This exemplified best the government's policy of granting all institutions of higher education autonomy, making them responsible for their policies, while still keeping the…

Feedback from students can inform improvement in higher education institutions and be part of the students' role in university management. To be effective it is important to"close the loop": from student views, through identifying issues and delegating responsibility for action, to informing students of the action resulting from their expressed…

This paper contains a consideration of the nature and role of warrants for research conclusions in educational research. The paper argues the need for an explicit warrant in the form of a logical and persuasive link between the evidence produced and the conclusions drawn (with appropriate qualifications and caveats). It describes social scientific…