Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2006), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 14 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2006.12014baa.001

Editorial

In this issue, we again have a set of papers that address pressing issues in quality in education. In the case of quality improvement, we have a paper that addresses the issue from an institutional perspective, a paper that addresses the departmental level challenges, a paper that concerns the program level and one that addresses the issues at the course level. These papers are supplemented by two papers that consider human resource management matters, one on levels of stress as perceived by academic staff and the final paper on the effect of casualisation of the academic workforce on academic standards. We start the set of articles in this issue with a discussion of enablers for meeting the European Quality Award, and end with a book review describing The Quiet Crisis in higher education. Our view has always been that such seemingly dichotomous perspectives interact vigorously, in the end, to result in procedures for maintaining quality that are realistic and down to the ground. The increasing number of very good papers being submitted is encouraging and has enabled us to increase the number of contributions published in this issue. We are also very pleased to be able to include the book reviews to enable the international readership to gain essential insights into current thinking. Ultimately, we believe that the more the variety of perspectives presented, the greater the potential for improved practice.

Dealing overall at the institutional level, Calvo-Mora, Leal and Roldán, in their article, analyse the implicit relationships among enablers of the European excellence model to serve as a framework for the management and improvement of quality in higher education. They conclude that the results achieved indicate the role of enablers as a basis for establishing a management model that leads universities towards excellence. They claim that the comprehension of these relationships would provide a guide to implement, develop, assess and improve higher education institutions.

Looking more at a departmental level, the article by Becket and Brookes undertakes a critical evaluation of the different methods used to assess the quality provision in higher education in UK. The authors develop a quality audit tool that incorporates all key components of effective quality management provisions as applicable to a department. The authors claim their work to be one of the first studies dealing with the testing of implicit relationships among the enablers, as set out by the European quality model.

Benchmarking is a poorly understood area in education. The article by Henderson-Smart, Winning, Gerzina, King and Hyde describes a method for benchmarking teaching and learning in response to an institutional need to validate a new programme. Using a quality enhancement framework, levels of achievement for each indicator are said to have been developed. The authors claim that this model can be adapted for any benchmarking project in all levels of education: primary, secondary, tertiary and continuing.

Another contentious area is the dichotomy between business management and educational improvement techniques. In their article Gapp and Fisher illustrate a new paradigm for implementing “action learning” as advocated by management specialists, in a key subject area in a program. The paper presents an action-research-based course-evaluation methodology, and illustrates the new paradigm in action via a case study, set within core management and human resource management courses.

It has always been argued that perceived levels of stress amongst academic staff, usually attributed to managerialism in institutions, impact negatively on the learning experience of students. Stevenson and Harper in their study in the following article present the results of their surveys in an institution carried out over an interval of ten years. However, in both the surveys, over half of respondents considered themselves to be considerably stressed, causing their teaching to be “below par”. The authors emphasise the need to identify potential stressors and take positive steps to help staff deal with the issues.

In the next article, Cavanaugh investigates how the increased use of part-time and nontenure-track instructors may result in grade inflation. This research uses ten years of data at a US institution, and concludes that part-time and nontenure-track instructors give higher grades even after accounting for many alternative explanations. One way in which this problem could be mitigated would be by lessening the reliance on student evaluations as a determinant of the quality of instruction provided.

In the book review that follows, James takes up the book by Morley on Quality and Power in Higher Education. Morley is said to conclude that the so-called “quality movement” in universities has not delivered any improvement, given the effort and costs involved. This book seems to leave no room at all for the concepts of quality and quality assurance in universities, yet offers no alternatives or suggestions. James concludes that the book contains “some useful criticism of the effects of current quality assurance efforts, but it offers no ways forward”.

In the final piece in the issue, McBurnie reviews the book The Quiet Crisis: How Higher Education is Failing America by Smith. The book is said to deal with three issues: inequity in education, outdated ways of teaching, and poor use of technology to improve learning. McBurnie queries the level of discussion of issues: rather than taking a scholarly approach backed by close data analysis, the book is described as “a chatty primer”. Nonetheless, the book is described as an “… enjoyable read and handily encapsulates a strand of modern thinking” on higher education.

Finally, the team hopes that the articles included for your consideration in this issue will provide inspiration for reflection, individually and collectively, to review some of the perspectives on quality in higher education.

John DalrympleFor the Editorial Team