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Part I
Assuring Quality
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1 Quality Assurance for University Teaching
Issues and Approaches
Roger Ellis
I wrote a chapter of this kind as an introduction to Quality Assurance for University Teaching in 1993. On the surface, the landscape has changed considerably since 1993. On the other hand, many of the issues I identified then are still issues and change, or better still development, is not that apparent.
Definitions can make tedious beginnings, but in this case they are still necessary. Quality, quality assurance, and, indeed, teaching itself are still open to a range of interpretations. So, one aim of this chapter will be to look at different ways in which the terms have been used and their implications.
A second aim is to identify some of the key issues in quality assurance for university teaching. These include problems in assuring quality for teaching in the light of two paradoxes. These paradoxes concern scientific knowledge of teaching and learning and its use to evidence practice, and the professional qualification of teachers as teachers. The knowledge paradox is that in universities dedicated to knowledge there is little attention to knowledge about teaching and learning. The qualification paradox is that in universities where much of their work is concerned with professional qualifications, only a minority of lecturers have a professional qualification in teaching. Other issues include outcome measures for teaching and the accreditation of programmes.
A third aim is to make some comparisons between 1993 when Quality Assurance for University Teaching was published and the situation in 2018. This will thus be a 25-year progress report. There are four topics on which I want to focus particularly to identify change and perhaps improvement. The first is quality assurance systems, both in universities and applying to universities. The second is the evidence-based identification of quality in teaching and learning and its use to underpin teaching. The third is teacher training for university lecturers. The fourth is the involvement of students in identifying and developing quality.
To conclude the chapter, I will outline the issues and approaches that will be covered in the rest of the chapters in the book and which should, of course, relate to the issues I have raised.
Definitions
In essence quality assurance is about ensuring that standards are specified and met consistently for a product or service. The term is derived partly from manufacturing and service industry, partly from health care. Its adoption for education has been rapid and pervasive. But how appropriate and useful is it for university teaching?
Quality itself is a somewhat ambiguous term since it has connotations of both standards and excellence. Thus, to talk of ‘the quality of teaching’ might refer to high or low standards whereas reference to ‘quality teaching’ implies excellence. The association of quality assurance with excellence may be misleading. It may also be convenient when it masks the assurance of minimum standards only with the appearance of excellence.
Standards of some kind are essential for quality assurance. But standards, like beauty, are usually in the eyes or perceptions of observers. Who are the observers who would identify quality for university teaching? An important idea is that the consumers of a product or service should be the ultimate arbiters of quality. From this stems the idea that quality is that which satisfies a consumer or customer. In its simplest form quality in university teaching would be that which satisfies the primary customer, the student. This notion is expressed more formally by the British Standards Institute: ‘Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.’ Thus, the needs of students might be stated by them or might be implied on their behalf by the teacher.
Customers or consumers are not always straightforward to identify. Or more usually there are too many of them. For example, who are the consumers of university teaching? In an obvious sense students consume or experience teaching but others who have to be satisfied include colleagues, heads of department, funding bodies, employers, government and society as a whole. All of these may in some sense be identified as customers for the teaching of a university. Teaching is also self-evidently an important element in the identity of the teacher whether it is embraced enthusiastically or not. The producers themselves must be satisfied, too.
A different angle is to conceive quality as fitness for purpose. Hence the quality of a particular machine would be determined by the extent to which it met its stated purpose. Theoretically this kind of quality would exist even if many observers and indeed customers were, at least initially, unable to appreciate it. It is also a more useful definition for situations where there are no obvious customers or where there are multiple customers. Thus, the quality of teaching would be determined by its fitness to achieve stated purposes, presumably with regard to learning and capability.
Learning may be considered in the short term, assessed within the programme, in the medium term as it impacts on employment, and in the long term as it lays the foundations for lifelong learning. University learned may also be positioned on a continuum from instrumental, fulfilling an immediate applied purpose, to liberal, encouraging criticism and dissent. This continuum reflects an abiding tension in university education.
Other definitions include ‘conformance to requirement’ (Crosby 1984) and ‘the predictable degree of uniformity and dependability, at low cost and suited to the market’ (Deming 1982). Key concepts here include conformity to standards, and standards that are appropriate for a purpose and satisfy a market. Deming also emphasizes the importance of cost-effectiveness, that is satisfying the market at low or the lowest possible cost.
Of these definitions, the notion of fitness for purpose is perhaps the most
straightforward, but soon complicated by the complexity and multiplicity of purposes. However, the idea of a customer or customers who must be satisfied is too important to lose. So, a working definition of quality might be: Quality refers to the standards that must be met to achieve specified purposes to the satisfaction of customers.
The purpose of teaching is, of course, learning. So, the quality of teaching is its fitness for the purpose of promoting learning. Unfortunately, there are no laws and precious few theories linking teaching and learning. So, standards would be for teaching, whose effect on learning is largely conjectural. Or quality may be judged by outcomes or performance indicators, whose cause in teaching is unclear.
If quality refers to standards, what is meant by assurance? First, it is important to realize that ‘assurance’ is transitive: the assuring is done by someone who wishes to assure someone else. Thus, a box of matches carrying the legend ‘Quality Assured’ is giving a message from the manufacturer to me the customer. It is intended to reassure me that the standards I expect from a match will be met consistently by each match in the box. Thus, quality assurance is a process whereby a manufacturer or producer guarantees to a customer or client that the goods or service concerned will meet standards consistently. Who is trying to reassure whom for university teaching? One interpretation is that the university is trying to reassure itself that its teaching is up to standard. Another is that universities, being publicly funded, are trying to reassure society, or at least its representatives, that they are delivering the service they are paid to deliver. At a more basic commercial level universities are trying to assure their customers, whether students, employers or grant-awarding bodies, that their service is up to scratch and worth the money.
While this establishment of confidence is the essence of quality assurance, the term has come to refer to the entire process whereby standards are maintained. It thus subsumes quality control and quality management, both of which will now be considered.
Quality control is the process whereby the product or service, or any part of the process associated with its production or delivery, is checked against a predetermined standard and rejected or recycled if below standard. This is a well-known feature at the end of a production line but it is equally important at all stages from the initial acceptance of raw materials. It is more difficult to apply to a service since once a service has been delivered it cannot be retrieved and recycled. But at least a service can be identified as deficient and steps taken to ensure a better performance next time. This is a more complicated notion of quality control than mere rejection of the substandard and begins to shade into the use of feedback as part of quality management.
The total process whereby a particular organization is managed to achieve and hence be able to assure quality is quality management, or, less ambiguously, the management of quality. Thus, in order to assure quality a manufacturer will have to manage production to achieve quality consistently. This will involve, at key stages, quality control. The management process will be complex and will involve, inter alia, specifying standards and procedures; documenting these standards and procedures; regularly checking reality against these standards and remedying any shortfalls; identifying responsibilities; investing in staff training and development and a number of other steps. Central to the whole process will be the identification of a customer’s needs and the provision of a product or service to satisfy them. Feedback from customers, whether in detail or, more broadly, through purchase, complaint or rejection, will be crucial. If this management of quality is to be effective it can be argued that all aspects of the organization must be covered and all staff involved: a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. It is this, perhaps self-evident, proposition that has led to the expression Total Quality Management (TQM), totality referring to the involvement of all in production and management (not as is sometimes thought the achievement of ultimate and total perfection).
It is doubtful if any university could claim to have a wholly explicit let alone total management system dedicated to ensuring quality in its teaching. Even if there were agreement about standards for teaching and all teachers were involved, the system would also have to cover all support services since each could be demonstrated to have some effect on teaching and learning, however indirectly.
If a firm claims to have a system for the management of quality, quality management, then it can be audited to see whether the system does in fact exist and operate as claimed. Thus, there can be a quality audit. This is the activity initially carried out by the HEQC Division of Quality Audit (DQA) now by the Quality Assurance Agency. The Agency claims to be auditing the quality assurance mechanisms of universities for teaching. Strictly speaking, if the above definitions are followed, the QAA is auditing the quality management procedures of universities, these being a necessary condition for quality to be assured. These management procedures would be required to specify standards in teaching so that the university can assure customers or anyone else who wants to know that the quality represented in the standards is being achieved.
If the organization aims not only to meet standards but exceed them and perhaps establish new standards, this brings in the idea of quality improvement or quality enhancement. If such improvement is conceived as a characteristic of an organization built into its processes of monitoring, feedback and change this might be described as continuous quality improvement (CQI).
Audit, then, is checking that someone is doing what he says he is doing. It would require a further step to say whether the organization might be aiming to do the right thing in the first place. Such an evaluation moves into the area of quality assessment, which is judging the standards reached by an organization against external criteria. Thus, an external examiner in the present system audits a programme’s own assessment procedures to check whether the examining system is operating as planned, but also assesses quality in the sense that the standards reached by the students on the course are compared with those obtaining generally in the higher education system.
We now have a number of terms involving the word quality:
- quality assurance;
- quality management;
- total quality management;
- quality control;
- quality audit;
- quality assessment;
- continuous quality improvement.
The quality of teaching is the standards it must meet. Quality assurance is the process whereby customers, producers or any other interested parties are satisfied that standards will be consistently met. To provide such assurance a system of quality management is necessary. Part of this system will be quality control, whereby conformity with standards is checked and steps are taken if conformity is not achieved. The quality management system may be checked to see if it actually exists and works; this is a quality audit. The products or services may be checked externally to see if standards are being met; this is quality assessment. Finally, there might be a commitment to improvement and development; this entails quality improvement or enhancement.
Issues
These definitions are derived from the literature on quality assurance in manufacturing and service industries, including health. The terms are still relatively new to education generally and higher education in particular. However, while quality assurance has been embraced with almost immoderate enthusiasm by government; this enthusiasm has not always been matched by precision of use or, one suspects, any great understanding of its use elsewhere. For example, both the seminal early White Paper (1991) and the early pronouncements of the then Division of Quality Audit used quality assurance and quality control as if they were interchangeable. It is, therefore, particularly important to be clear at this early stage what is understood by quality assurance and related terms and what kind of activities and procedures might be considered relevant in an educational context. A basic question is whether universities already have procedures that could be described as quality assurance or whether the term implies a radically new approach and practices.
In 1993 I suggested that responses to quality assurance in higher education may be considered as falling into one or more of three categories.
First, there is the view that quality assurance is just a new label for a set of procedures that are well established in higher education. External examination, course validation, professional commitment, peer review and even examination results have all been put forward as aspects of quality assurance for university teaching. Some of these practices are well established and universal; others, while universal, could be improved; others are established in new universities, ex polytechnics, but still relatively novel in more established universities. Quality assurance is thus conceived as more or less latent in the university system and just requiring explicit identification to make it manifest.
An opposite view is that quality assurance, as practised elsewhere, represents a novel approach to the establishment and maintenance of standards in universities. Imported from industry or health care, these approaches will give universities a necessary shake-up and, in the process, make them more accountable, student-orientated...
