Handbook Of Quality Assurance For University Teaching

This practical and authoritative handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the issues and approaches to assuring quality in university teaching. Including contributions from major international figures, the book contains a wealth of ideas and practical advice to help universities commit to quality in teaching and offers insights into how the topics raised can be directly applied. The book initially identifies some of the key issues surrounding the topic, such as the evidence-based identification of teaching quality; the training of university lecturers and faculty; external and internal quality assurance; the tension between professional autonomy and governmental regulation; and the involvement of students in developing quality. It then moves on to present ideas and initiatives to address these problems, tackling the subject through four sections: Assuring Quality – questioning what quality assurance means and how it might be practised; Identifying Quality – examining what knowledge exists at present and how it might be further researched; Developing Quality – investigating the development of staff through teacher training and appraisal; Case Studies of Quality Assurance – reviewing six case studies of quality assurance in a range of contrasting subjects including the professional subjects of Medicine, Nursing and Teacher Training which are also addressed systemically in the first section. Full of practical advice, Handbook of Quality Assurance for University Teaching is an invaluable and unique resource for Faculty, Subject Leaders, University Administrators and Quality Assessors.

The management of quality and sustainability in higher education institutions ensures that proper standards are maintained. Such enforced standardization allows for the highest caliber of training opportunities for various fields and disciplines. The Handbook of Research on Quality Assurance and Value Management in Higher Education is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on quality management and assurance programs and standards in college-level environments. Highlighting global perspectives on academic and professional learning, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and professionals actively involved in the field of higher education.

As higher education becomes a key determinant for economic competitiveness, institutions face increasing pressure to demonstrate their fitness to meet the needs of society and individuals. Blending innovative research with richly contextualised examples this unique Research Handbook provides authoritative insights from around the globe on how best to understand, assess and improve quality, performance and accountability in higher education.

Universities and further education colleges are under increasing pressure to provide 'quality' for their students. Quality assurance and development issues affect the staff, resources, administration and culture of an academic institution, yet there is often a lack of clear guidance available to those responsible for implementing best practice. This book provides practical guidelines for managing academic quality assurance and quality enhancement, outlining best practice from both the UK and the rest of the world. Each chapter addresses the key points, risks and good practice across a wide range of quality issues, drawing explicitly and in detail from the QAA guidance on the Code of Practice, Subject Benchmarks, Qualifications Framework and Institutional Audit. The material is presented in an accessible and straightforward style, incorporating useful features such as development questions for individual or team review. A maintained website accompanying this book (www.academicquality.com) contains further useful resources, with updates and supplementary material in this constantly changing area.

Assuring quality for teaching in a time of rapid change is the major challenge facing UK universities. This practical book combines review chapters with case studies within a number of comparative perspectives, describing approaches to quality assurance in the context of teaching.

The significant growth of number of students enrolled in tertiary education institutions in the recent past decades has caused an unprecedented expansion of higher education systems. The rapid and constant social, economic and technological mutations and international competition make the importance of qualitatively well-educated citizenry and labor forces very decisive. Globalization has developed a powerful impact on the development of higher education and imposes new challenges for the organization (standards, financing, regulations). Systems of higher education tend to detach from the national models and adopt a more "global" orientation. The implementation of quality assurance is one of the recent and most decisive transformations of higher education. Different higher education systems are trying to develop assessment tools (internal and external) to improve the quality of teaching, research and extension activities, and these are either based on experiences of selected countries or are extensively country specific. The quality assurance procedures that were often dependent on national directorial traditions have gradually tended to converge and led to a setup of common tools and standards. Countries under a centralized system tend to impose a uniform and general model while decentralized systems give greater freedom to universities to set up their own quality. International rankings of universities also contribute to impose a set of transnational standards and values, which is also being considered as indicative by the stakeholders. The present book tries to look at the quality assurance mechanism, international rankings and its impact in both absolute and comparative fashion in context of 11 countries from different parts of the world.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.