The Quality Assurance System for Ontario Postsecondary Education: 2010 ~ 2014 (original) (raw)
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The Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada
Research in Comparative and International Education, 2010
Under the Canadian constitution, responsibility for education is assigned to the provinces. In some provinces, universities are based in institution-specific statutes, in others, in system-wide legislation. Except for the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, the provinces leave the quality assurance of academic activities to the universities. In the last 15 years, the post-secondary landscape has become more complex. Four provinces have enabled non-degree-granting colleges to offer specific degree programs on the basis of government approval; three have transformed colleges into universities; four permit external universities, public and private, and new private universities based in Canada to offer programs. Though the innovative provinces established quality assurance agencies to screen programs and organizations, the new degrees met resistance from many public universities, which, in the absence of a national accrediting body, took the position that they would only recognize degrees from institutions belonging to their own promotional national body, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Though the new agencies have published both academic standards and rigorous external review procedures, this response from the public universities in effect marginalized the new degree programs and providers. Thus, the state of quality assurance in higher education in Canada is in a state of flux. This article reviews the state of quality assurance activity across the country in both public universities and in the new quality assurance agencies. It concludes with reflections on the challenge of inserting new degrees and new kinds of degree-granting institutions into a framework of academic legitimacy that all players will accept.
Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2020
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
SELF-REGULATION WITH RULES: LESSONS LEARNED FROM A NEW QUALITY ASSURANCE PROCESS FOR ONTARIO
The Province of Ontario has had some form of quality assurance since 1969. For most of the period since then there were separate forms for undergraduate and graduate programs. Eligibility for public funding is based on the assurance of quality by a buffer body. In 2010, after two years of work, a province-wide task force devised a new framework. This paper will discuss how the province over time has addressed problems that are generic to many jurisdictions in assuring quality: level of aggregation, pooling, definition of new and continuing programs, scope of jurisdiction, role of governors, performance indicators, relationship to accreditation, programs versus credentials, benchmarking, and isomorphism. The paper will pay particular attention to the balance between institutional autonomy in promoting quality and innovation in contrast to system-wide standards for assuring quality.
Lessons learned from two decades of Quality in Higher Education DRAFT
Quality in Higher Education was established in the early years of the quality revolution and has published 529 articles in the 21 annual volumes up to and including 2015. The journal was entitled quality in higher education to enable a focus on all aspects of higher education quality rather than just quality assurance. However, quality assurance issues loom large in the pages of the journal and about a quarter of all articles addressed external quality assurance. Nonetheless, throughout its history, Quality in Higher Education has avoided articles that primarily set out national quality assurance processes, preferring instead studies that explore the nature, impact of quality assurance or comparative studies. In similar vein, the journal tends not to publish studies based on a single institution unless they act as case study illustrations of wider internationally relevant concerns. From the outset the journal has been an international forum and contributions have come from North and South America, Australasia, Central and SouthEast Asia, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Gulf States, Africa and the Asian sub-continent. Naturally, many articles give a perspective from the authors' own countries but they are selected on the basis of their generalisability. The articles have ranged from conceptual and pragmatic enquiries into the nature of quality in higher education through explorations of quality assurance systems to the impact of they have on student learning. This paper explores what has been learned from these three million words. Four things stand out: the monolithic approach to quality assurance; the failure to adequately explore impact of quality assurance; the dissonance between bureaucratic assurance processes and student learning; the cynicism of academics about the efficacy and value of assurance processes. In addition, two other recurrent issues are not explored here. They are, first, the perennial debate about accountability and improvement, which has been analysed widely not just in the journal but elsewhere and the issues are well rehearsed and need no repeating except to say that in quality assurance processes accountability has rather overwhelmed improvement. Second, is the highjacking of the conceptualisation of quality education by quality assurance: the notion of intrinsic quality has been engulfed by quality assurance to the extent that quality has come to mean the processes by which quality is assured rather than the essential quality of the higher education provision. The monolithic approach to quality assurance Broadly speaking there are four ways of undertaking quality assurance: audit, accreditation, assessment/inspection and external examination/national examination. The journal has attracted very little by way of commentary on assessment or inspection (Cook,
Quality Assurance in Higher Education
While the provision of higher education is becoming ever diversified, increased mobility among professionals requires greater standardization among qualifications so that they can be assessed by national authorities for decisions relating to recognition. New methods to assess qualifications are also needed to combat the academic fraud that accompanies diversification of higher education. While national authorities may lack the competence to make judgments about the quality of academic programmes and institutions, there is little comparability of standards when academic institutions are both providers and judges of their own services. For this reason, external quality assurance is most commonly organized through the creation of independent administrative structures, i.e agencies that commonly function as professional buffer organizations between public authorities and higher education institutions. To meet with dynamics of change, new methods of quality assurance such as accreditation systems have become a concern in higher education and will be emphasize in this paper.