Quality assurance is well known internationally but the notion is relatively new in Norway. To understand some of the issues and dilemmas that emerge in the Norwegian reception of quality assurance in higher education, this article traces how quality assurance is gaining its form and how international trends are understood, transposed and adopted…

The Higher Education Quality Committee of the Council on Higher Education in South Africa recently carried out an evaluation of all MBA programmes offered in the country by South African as well as foreign higher education institutions. The MBA review is located within the context of the implementation of a comprehensive external quality assurance…

This short report explores the quality of the care process for children with intellectual disabilities. A Delphi procedure was used to identify a set of indicators for the quality of the care process reflecting the perspectives of the care providers, the parents and the experts. The sample consisted of 59 individuals involved in different ways in…

Voltammetry principles are introduced to students by means of a bipotentiometric method to determine vitamin C in fruits and vegetables. The aim is to draw attention to voltammetric methods, particular to the study of current-potential curves, stressing the potential applicability in areas of food quality control.

Quality assurance is well known internationally but the notion is relatively new in Norway. To understand some of the issues and dilemmas that emerge in the Norwegian reception of quality assurance in higher education, this article traces how quality assurance is gaining its form and how international trends are understood, transposed and adopted…

This article looks into the discursive construction of "quality" and "assessment" in Finnish higher education policy from the 1960s onwards. The theoretical assumption is that the discourse of "quality" not only describes the developments in Finnish higher education policy, but also produces and reproduces our views…

This paper describes the experience of one university in quality assuring higher education courses that were to be delivered by E-learning, or blended learning. The form of blended learning relies upon the use of staff from partner institutions who may not have been employed primarily solely to deliver higher education courses, be it by…

Quality systems within the subject institution had flip-flopped from an original model of total emphasis on measurement of standards by examination to one of evidence-based review of the quality of the programme team's quality assurance processes. In 2002 a major review of the institutional programme quality assurance system concluded that an…

In this article, the author describes how Change magazine finds new editorial home after the demise of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). The demise of the AAHE is an incalculable loss to higher education. But the Change transition team approached the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching about the possibility of…

The present report is the product of an ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) Bologna Seminar "Quality Assurance in Transnational Education: from words to action" hosted by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, UK) in London in December, 2008. The seminar discussed the current trends in Transnational…

In Spring 2006,. the NAEP Validity Studies (NVS) Panel was asked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to undertake a validity study to examine the quality of the NAEP Mathematics Assessments at grades 4 and 8. Specifically, NCES asked the NVS Panel to address five questions: (1) Does the NAEP framework offer reasonable content…

This report was prepared at the request of the Government of Malaysia (GOM) as a contribution to the long term development objectives for the university sector under the Ninth Malaysia Plan. The GOM is considering new policy directions to make the country a more competitive player in the world economy. Such a strategy will require bold innovations…

Facilities that self-police under the Environmental Protection Agency's Audit Policy are eligible for reduced penalties on disclosed violations. This paper investigates whether self-policing has additional consequences; in particular, whether self-policing reduces future enforcement activity. Using data on U.S. hazardous waste enforcement and…

Strategic planning and quality management have been developed independently of each other, but they meet in practice in many kinds of organisations. Strategic planning and quality assurance integrate different aspects of higher education institutions (HEIs) to ensure high-quality educational outcomes. This paper investigates the role of these two…

This paper begins by reviewing some of the different models of third-party observation of university teaching that can be found in the literature. Having analysed these, it argues that--if "peer" is taken to indicate equality of status--only one is genuinely a model of peer-observation. It proposes an alternative categorisation of third-party…