Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2015), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/QAE-02-2015-0005

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 23, Issue 2

The internationalisation of the education market has considerably extended its influence over the past two decades. Traditional internationalisation originally arose from the involvement of citizens of countries governed by colonial powers furthering their education, often at tertiary level, at institutions in the country of the colonial power. However, nowadays, there are many countries that have invested heavily in the advanced education of their citizens and the development of their institutions with a view to entering the education market in their own right.

Added to the traditional international education major players such as the USA, the UK, France and Germany, a number of countries have developed education hubs for example, Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East and a number of South American countries. Internationalisation of the education market and the diversification of the participants in that market mean that there is increasing influence of world rankings, greater scrutiny of internal accreditation processes for institutions and jurisdictions and a stronger focus on student perceptions of their educational experiences, participation in the scrutiny of the institutions that they attend and a keener interest in the relative portability and recognition of their academic credentials, irrespective of the country in which they were attained.

The papers in this issue address a number of these subjects with a focus on the Middle East, but with contributions from South America and Africa. The first paper in this issue, by Naceur Jabnoun, explores characteristics of countries that have a strong presence on the top rankings of Universities. Using indices of wealth, transparency and democracy, the top 500 ranked institutions were predominantly from countries with high values for the transparency index. However, to progress to the top 300 universities, transparency had to be accompanied by a high value for the wealth index used, indicating that ascending to the top tier required investment of significant financial resources as well as transparency.

The second paper by Noha Elassy looked at a number of Egyptian universities through the lens of the national accreditation body. The particular matter that is the focus of the paper is the involvement of students in the quality assurance processes in public and private universities. The paper indicates that students have a strong interest in making a substantial contribution to quality assurance processes and the improvements in their academic institutions, but it was found that the level of involvement of students was limited while their interest in being involved reflected their desire to be partners in quality assurance of their institutions.

The third paper in this issue, by Rahel Schomaker, is also focused on Egypt, but in this paper, the scrutiny is of the national accreditation system that is used to accredit institutions with a view to maintaining standards and enabling the portability of academic qualifications. The paper points out that there is a new accreditation body and that there have been concerns arising from the capacity of the national accreditation agency to accredit all higher education institutions in Egypt as well as outstanding matters related to the accreditation process and religious institutions as opposed to secular institutions.

The fourth paper, by Daniel A. López, Maria Rojas, Boris López and Daniel C. López, moves the focus to South America where the authors have investigated the national accreditation process in Chile. The national accreditation organisation accredits institutions for periods up to seven years. The institutions are either state-owned institutions or private institutions. However, some of the private institutions are in receipt of state funding, making them more like hybrid institutions.

Robert Wamala and Vincent Ssembatya, in the fifth paper in this issue, examined the contested matter of productivity in the context of the academic institution. The investigation relates to data on people who hold doctorates and are engaged in academic institutions in Uganda and uses structural equation modelling to investigate links between research output and outcome indicators.

The final paper in this issue is by Ahmed Al Kuwaiti, and Arun Vijay Subbarayalu and the paper reports on an investigation of how a sample of students in health science faculties in universities in Saudi Arabia view research training in their institutions. The results were not as positive as the institutions and their staff would have hoped and they provide institutions with an opportunity for improvement in the provision of research training in their health science faculties.

The papers in this issue come from a variety of geographical, institutional and disciplinary sources and provide insights into how jurisdictions and individual institutions are seeking to address standards and quality assurance in their educational provision.

John Dalrymple

Editor, QAE