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Summary and closing comments by Dr. David Woodhouse for the third "Virtual conference":
Accreditation/Quality Assurance/Credit Banking:    (11 - 29 January 1999)

7 Februay 1999

General Educational Issues

Many issues discussed were of general relevance, rather than relating specifically to open and/or distance learning (ODL), eg the purpose of education, competency assessment, etc.

Some governments use or want to use ‘employability’ as a measure of educational quality, despite the increasing calls by industry for creative and adaptable graduates with critical thinking and team-work skills, rather than narrow technical knowledge and training. Also, how do you measure ‘employability’ for a student group that is currently employed as they study part-time? Or, how is it measured and compared in different countries? Drucker was quoted on the ‘elementary skills that would make [students] effective as members of an organisation’. Some institutions draw up a ‘graduate profile’ - ie a description of the desired characteristics of their graduates. This includes discipline-specific and generic aspects, and the institution must then ensure that departments work together as necessary to achieve this goal.

Bodies of knowledge and understanding are less concrete that some of us would like to think, and are at least partly determined by whoever is viewing a particular phenomenon. We find our way along by socially constructing knowledge and understanding, and this must be included in any debate on what is taught and what is learned, and, in turn, what is its quality.

General Quality Issues

In the area of quality, also, we addressed many general issues. One was the need for frameworks, but frameworks that are interpreted flexibly. The use of quality audit, which investigates whether an organisation is achieving its own objectives, offers great flexibility.

Quality audit is also of value in relation to another issue, namely the need to address process quality as well as product quality. Quality audit places as much emphasis on systems processes as on outcomes, and this was seen to be an essential requirement for meaningful quality review. ISO9000 also covers processes, but education does not fit its template. Furthermore, the processes should be seen not merely as steps on the way to specified outcomes, but processes that promote the values we hold for university (or polytechnic, or college) education.

Another issue is ‘trust’, which seems to be disappearing from academia and the public sector, just as it is re-discovered by the private sector. Academia can also learn from the business sector in the latter’s attention to Senge’s work and the development of the institution as a learning organisation.

We were reminded that quality cannot be divorced from resources, although much governmental action seems to be based on the assumption that it can. This is perhaps particularly noticeable where ODL techniques and technological methods are embraced for reasons of (supposed) economy, not pedagogy.

We discussed the definition and measurement of teaching and learning quality, and some work by the former HE Quality Council in the UK was quoted.

Doug Shale observed that much discussion of education is based on the beliefs that - all knowledge is specifiable and hence amenable to "commodification" - there is a way to measure "amounts" learned in some absolute fashion, and - there is a Platonic version of perfection that is the benchmark for ascertaining or measuring quality; whereas, in fact, every possible specification is at best an indication or proxy. It follows that if we lack a deterministic basis for prescribing knowledge and understanding, we also lack a deterministic basis for its measurement.

ODL Issues

Moving to more specific ODL aspects, Bernadette Robinson and Tom Prebble identified some characteristics of ODL that pose new challenges, and some that offer new opportunities.

• more stakeholders or sites involved in the creation & delivery of a course or programme; - longer chains of communication; - often larger scale; - more separate activities and roles to be coordinated; - greater administrative needs (such as record keeping); - more delegation of assessment in competency testing; - achieving consistency of practice over a distributed organisation or a collaboratively-delivered programme or course; - a different interpretation of what constitutes ‘teaching’ (for example, in the separation of roles in providing learning content and support); - greater issues of credibility. - a more careful and deliberate process of planning and development of courses and systems than is common for conventional delivery. - most ODL programmes have more centralised systems of management, servicing and communications. - in ODL programmes the central teaching task is available for leisurely and detailed inspection - the mechanics of ODL tend to develop an organisational culture that is more receptive to the establishment and promulgation of standards and the assessment of quality than is common in conventional institutions. - a reversion to the metaphor of the cottage industry in the development and servicing of on-line courses, where the developer/teacher is solely responsible for every aspect of developing, teaching, servicing and assessing their courses. - complications are raised by a transition from a largely correspondence-based ODL programme to an increasingly on-line system - QA processes that are accepted as integral to the ODL programme can provide models for the assessment of quality in campus-based programmes.

As several contributors observed, much lies in the hands of the academics themselves, as they grasp opportunities presented by the new modes, and the changing environment.

Quality Issues in ODL

As we considered the characteristics of ODL, we considered the internal and external QA processes, and whether ODL is best served by having special-purpose internal processes and external requirements, or by the development of more generic processes that are applicable to face-to-face, correspondence and electronic learning (to mention but three). Considerations include the fact that many institutions use a mix of approaches, and whether too much emphasis on a different approach may undermine equivalence and credibility. As a specific instance of this, it was suggested that the use of a course co-ordinator with responsibility for ensuring that all assessments of a course are ‘equivalent’ is preferable to a requirement for identical examinations. However, we reached no firm view on the general issue, and more research is needed.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, external quality assurance (EQA) agencies define quality. When this definition is incompatible with an institution or mode (eg ODL), the institution must convince the EQA agency to change. Unfortunately, this is an unequal situation. However, COL is a member of INQAAHE, and this provides one vehicle through with it can communicate as a fraternal body with EQA agencies. COL could inform them of the characteristics of ODL, what constitutes quality in this area, and what they should be seeking as evidence of quality.

Another suggestion was for work to be done on developing some standard expressions for each or a group of QA related aspects.

Another aspect we considered briefly was the fragmentation permitted by the Internet. Rather than looking for an institution offering the course s/he wants, a prospective student could search for individual academics offering the components s/he wants. In theory, this could require the EQA agency to accredit the individual academics. In practice, institutions will take responsibility for orchestrating the offerings of individual academics, and, importantly, providing the credentialling function.

Many QA questions, both internal and external, that are being raised by ODL institutions and activities, are then seen to be just as applicable to traditional institutions.

International Issues

ODL lends it self to transmission of education across national boundaries (although this can be done in other ways too). This raises questions of the maintenance of quality, and the guarantee that it is being maintained, internationally. At present, some offerings have to answer to two EQA agencies (at home and abroad) while others slip between the cracks and answer to no-one. Furthermore, since education is very clearly not culturally neutral, the determination of what constitutes ‘equivalent quality’ is far from easy. The Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE) was mentioned in this respect, and COL could investigate ways of working with GATE to address issues in this area.

Dr David Woodhouse
President, International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE)
Director, New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit (AAU)
Te Wahanga Tatari Kaute Tohungatanga o nga Whare Wananga o Aotearoa

tel: 64-4-801-7924; fax: 64-4-801-7926
email: director@aau.ac.nz
snailmail: AAU, POBox 9747, Wellington, NZ
location: 7/F West Block, Education House,
178 Willis Street, Wellington, NZ

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