The Council Recommendation on building bridges for effective European cooperation in higher education (hereinafter the Recommendation), adopted on 5 April 2022, aims at enabling deeper and more effective transnational cooperation among higher education institutions across Europe. Challenges hampering seamless cooperation have many sources and may…

Quality aims at meeting customer satisfaction through its various attributes in a product, process or system. Quality has to meet the requirements of a competitive environment, offer good price for cost and meet customer satisfaction. In the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system, quality means the special attributes of ODL, such as being…

In rapidly changing employment markets, career guidance has a vital role to play in supporting people in navigating transitions between education and employment across the lifespan. In this article, the issue of quality and quality assurance in career guidance is explored. Although there is no clear agreed international understanding of what…

This paper examines the impact of external quality assurance evaluations conducted by the Institutional Evaluation Programmes (IEP). IEP is an international quality assurance agency offering improvement-oriented peer reviews to higher education institutions on a voluntary basis. The paper is based on the results of a survey sent to evaluated…

Human beings are compulsive learners. Strong demographic and economic factors coincide with this natural desire to learn. This current paper focuses on quality aspects of shorter-term educational experiences. What features determine quality? What type of quality reviews would be most suitable? Are accreditation and quality assurance as they have…

Purpose: This study aims to analyze the external quality assurance (EQA) strategies of Technological Institutes (TIs) in Mexico, between 2010 and 2020. For this purpose, this study tracks sectoral reforms and institutional adaptation processes toward fulfilling accreditation indicators. This study considers accreditation as an emergent strategy…

Comparing universities and courses is of interest to a variety of stakeholders including potential students, policy makers, news and media organisations, ranking providers, and universities themselves. There are a range of existing university ranking schemes that provide comparisons (e.g. Academic Ranking of World Universities) but typically these…

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) has not yet been studied historically and comparatively. Based on our interviews with professors and administrators at 18 universities in three countries, we discuss how SET diffused in all the studied universities and how SET was translated and edited differently according to different sets of statements. SET…

Despite the strong criticisms, mass student surveys play an important role in the quality assurance process of national higher education systems. While some national higher education systems have a long history of using student surveys to inform teaching and course quality improvement (e.g. the UK, Australia), in Italy, where the quality assurance…

To enhance the quality of higher education in Afghanistan, the Afghan Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) adapted quality assurance and accreditation (QAA) policies developed in other countries to the Afghan context. Perspectives on the effectiveness of the new QAA policy have been mixed. On the one hand, the MoHE believes the QAA policy has…

Purpose: This paper aims to present the lessons learned during the design and implementation of a quality assurance system (QAS) in an academic unit and considers the regulatory changes to institutional accreditation in Chilean higher education, the international standard ISO 21001:2018, and the stakeholders' requirements.…

This paper provides an analysis of the literature on transnational education to identify the key challenges and success factors for the sustainable operation of transnational higher education (TNE) programmes as perceived by key stakeholders. Probing the stakeholders' perspectives and applying a systematic approach, this study analyses 227…

This study explores the potential of using screen time data in learning management systems (LMS) to estimate student learning time (SLT) and validate the credit value of courses. Gathering comprehensive data on actual student learning time is difficult, so this study uses LMS Moodle logs from a computer programming course with 490 students over 16…

Purpose: Following education's recent and abrupt reliance on technology-mediated pedagogies, the novel coronavirus pandemic has, in many instances, highlighted the unpreparedness of learning institutions worldwide to implement effective online instruction. While practical quality considerations include content delivery, teacher training, equipment…

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) has numerous benefits in medical curricula. In the extended curriculum programme (ECP) at a university in South Africa, remedial interventions, such as same year/level PAL, were implemented to improve academic success. This article focuses on the measures to ensure the quality of PAL as an intervention for the academic…