Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Eastern and Southern Africa

Regional and Continental Perspectives

Peter Neema-Abooki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367692834
• eBook ISBN: 9781000426380
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the critical aspect of quality assurance maintenance of competitive-standards in African higher education. It explores both the micro and macro-levels of continental African higher education regulatory authorities, and analyses different institutional, regional and national practices for moving towards continental quality assurance approaches.

Contributed to by scholars across Eastern and Southern Africa, the book considers conceptual, practical, epistemological and policy dimensions of quality and quality assurance, especially in relation to higher education in Africa. It therefore draws on research and local expertise to open up debate about how to assure and enhance the quality of higher education, providing a comprehensive review of eight countries and considers societal challenges. It aims to satisfy the need of more thoughtful and critical works on African education as produced by African educators. The uniqueness of this book lies in integrating both the theoretical and practical dimensions of quality to devise appropriate strategies for ensuring quality and standards in higher education in continental Africa and beyond.

This authoritative book advocates for a timely discussion around the prpvision of good quality higher education and research in African universities, and will be of great interest to academics, policy makers, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of higher education, comparative education and African studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Quality education in Eastern and Southern Africa – retrospectives and perspectives

Peter Neema-Abooki

Makerere University

Justification

Defined from the higher education context, the basic understanding of the concept of ‘quality’ is dependent on a set of perspectives based on the understandings of various interests of different constituencies or stakeholders in higher education (HE), its references, the attributes or characteristics of the academic world, and the historical period in the development of HE (Zabaadi, 2013), among others. While ‘quality’ is an aspect often designed to embrace effectiveness, efficiency and accountability (Kihwelo, 2013), quality assurance (QA) is a combination of planned and systematic activities implemented in an education system so that the quality requirement for education is fulfilled when compared with some acceptable standard (Kihwelo, 2013; Sanga & Ahn, 2014). It is also a systematic measurement, a comparison with a standard, the monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers error prevention (Kihwelo, 2013). All in all, QA is quotidian.

While ‘quality education’ is considered as one of the major elements that guarantee sustainable economic and social development at the national and regional levels of a given economy, Sanga and Ahn (2014) propose that ‘quality of education’ is relative and varies from one education system to another and is subjective, varying with time and societal expectation.

Over the past two decades, QA processes in HE have become increasingly a common phenomenon. Factors that have contributed to this development include advocacy by the government and industry for a well-educated workforce, which per se is essential for increased productivity and to maintain a competitive edge in the global knowledge economy (Nicholson, 2011). Accordingly, with globalisation in the twenty-first century, higher education institutions (HEIs) are presented with a number of challenges and opportunities which include how to assure quality in HE and to enhance global competitiveness (Hou, 2014). Today, with the rapid expansion of HEIs and the increasing market-based orientation, stakeholders have much greater interest in the actual academic quality of universities and colleges (Altbach & Knight, 2007). Thus, several mechanisms of assessing quality in HE have developed recently based on processes and purpose including QA (Carrasco, 2013).

QA in HE should therefore be a deliberate and systematic process whereby institutions constantly monitor teaching, learning, governance and all other factors that either facilitate or impinge on the smooth running of the institution (Neema-Abooki & Gitta, 2017).

In Africa the term ‘higher education’ is synonymous with tertiary education; as is the case in Uganda and the USA. And according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘higher education’ is defined as education beyond the secondary level, especially education provided by a college or university.

The HE sector will become a more important issue in the decade ahead, owing to the fact that HEIs, and universities in particular, play critical roles in the modern knowledge-based economy; they are also considered to be the engine of national development (Anim & Mensah, 2015; Cloete, Bailey & Maassen, 2011; Dib & Alnaze, 2013; Kara, Tanui & Kalai, 2016; Mishra & Kushwaha, 2016). As Haruna Yakubu (2017) asserts, knowledge itself is not sufficient until it is translated into a form of benefit or reward for society.

HE is rapidly expanding and diversifying in terms of enrolment, access, study programmes and curricula, and stakeholder demands, among others. These challenges threaten the capacity of universities to fulfil their core mandate of teaching and learning, research output and community engagement – to which the question of QA in HE is directly related.

The technological and socio-economic trends, innovations and inventions of the twenty-first century demand that extra attention be put on education for national, regional and international development – if education is to serve its purpose. Presupposed therefore is ‘service quality’ – defined in terms of administrative quality, physical environment and core educational quality, support facilities quality and transformative quality (Teeroovengadum, Kamalanabhan & Seebaluck, 2016). Suffice to note that service quality has received greater attention by many institutions due to the demand towards ensuring customer satisfaction. Implied here too is that every institution should strive to monitor the quality of its services and develop enhancement strategies to meet and maintain, and even exceed, the needs of its customers.

Quality is hence an indispensable tenet if HE is to meet societal needs and match global competition. QA in HE should therefore be embraced in all aspects including inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes. HEIs must accordingly take into account diversity and plurality within national, regional (NCHE, 2013) and global systems. This de jure is a call to internationalisation – described by Özturgut, Cantu, Pereira and Ramón (2014) as a process that incorporates international perspectives in learning, research and service in such institutions. It is an advocacy agenda for inventiveness and innovativeness for the integral development of the region and the entire African continent.

Structure of the book and summary of content

The overall book interrogates issues under four main themes: quality assurance discourses and challenges in higher education (seven chapters), quality higher education and development (six chapters), quality education for social justice and societal development (six chapters), and quality assurance in transnational and international education (four chapters).

In Chapter 2 Proscovia Namubiru Ssentamu and Michael Mawa trace the genesis of quality assurance systems during the pre-liberal, liberal and neo-liberal periods in Uganda. Before the mid-1980s, the systems were based on institutional affiliations, following the University of London. The authors discovered that the promulgation of the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions Act (2001) in the country brought about a shift of accreditation, national and professional benchmarks, and a hybrid of external and internal systems. Consequently, a national forum was established to catalyse the process of ensuring quality standards in universities and harmonised national, regional and international higher education quality assurance systems – a stance likely to be a lesson to the entire subsector in the rest of Africa. In Chapter 3 Benedicto Malunga follows suit but across the whole of African higher education, while ascertaining that a university is not a purely African creation but an imported tool from the former colonial masters. He notes that African universities are pursuing the notion of quality and its assurance from a position of generally common imperatives like globalisation, new public management and the need to change the way we teach. Nevertheless, he perceives commonalities among the systems and regards Africa as improving against a background of limited resources. The author also depicts the evolution of quality and its assurance in his native University of Malawi (UNIMA), which according to him is embracing this culture of external scrutiny and responding to global pressures like internationalisation, massification and the need for comparability of the education it offers with what obtains elsewhere. He utilises his doctoral research on decentralisation as a component of new public management with a view to establishing potential interventions. He also employs his own reflections as a higher education professional, together with the UNIMA functional review contained in the Taskforce Report of 2018.

In Chapter 4 Jessica Aguti, Lazarus Nabaho and Wilberforce Turyasingura – in their study on the practices and policies of QA in open and distance education at the Uganda Management Institute (UMI) – equate the quality of open distance e-learning (OdeL) as comparable to that of conventional higher education. Consequently, QA is advanced as the most reliable tool for guaranteeing parity of esteem of ODeL qualifications and those of campus-based education, though, as they believe, a dearth of studies about the fluid nature of QA in an ODeL setting exists in Africa. The results reveal both convergence and divergence in QA practices for conventional and distance learning.

In Chapter 5 Abdu Kisige and Peter Neema-Abooki focus on the quality of teacher-educators as perceived by internal stakeholders. The authors adopt Makerere University as a case study in the context of Ugandan public universities and are guided by the pedagogical content knowledge model. Following a sole objective, they utilise convenient and purposive sampling and employ a descriptive qualitative case study design and analyse the information using descriptive and analytical techniques. Recommended are classification mechanisms that would ably tune education towards addressing the needs of stakeholders and society. The chapter ultimately propagates a catch phrase: technology-enabled student-support services.

Joel Jonathan Kayombo, in Chapter 6, analyses marketisation processes and implications on institutional internal quality assurance mechanisms in the Tanzanian HE landscape where institutions are being left to operate as corporate bodies. He categorises three major markets to which HE in Tanzania is subjected and whose forces increasingly put pressure on the quality of services and products; namely a market for the service of education, a market for the research, and a capital market. He emphasises that marketisation and its associated QA demands are tyrannical practices, embedding symbolic control and hegemony, while posing serious challenges to institutional internal QA mechanisms in the universities in Tanzania. Similarly, Anamika Srivastava in Chapter 7, discussing the marketed ‘quality’ of HE in the universities in South Africa, holds that in the context of the marketisation of HE, ‘quality’ is jointly and contestably defined by the neo-liberal state, academics and so-called consumers of HE, as well as students/parents. He uses web content discourse analysis with an emphasis on real factors on six websites of HE institutions offering master’s degrees in business administration and finds that universities are not passive entities simply responding to the demands of various stakeholders in HE, but are actively constructing their own narratives on quality, invoking marketing knowledge.

In Chapter 8, Peter Neema-Abooki and Olive Lunyolo probe the extent to which qualifications, workload, motivation and tenure of appointment of academic staff vis-à-vis teaching and learning affect, positively or negatively, the quality at Makerere University and at the University of Cape Town. What is discovered is that the variables under study are, in the two universities, guided by policy frameworks linked to the institutions’ missions and strategic plans and to the respective National QA Frameworks; although the University of Cape Town has well established mechanisms for the improvement of staff welfare and quality education. The authors recommend QUEST analysis for all universities in the region.

In Chapter 9, the authors – using a concurrent mixed methods design – explore the extent to which quality internship support to student-teachers at the University of Rwanda College of Education equips future teachers with subject-curricular-pedagogic knowledge. The findings in this chapter suggest that the educands received relevant support despite the lecturers not always being available on the sport. The overall evaluation is the effectiveness of the internship as it contributes to acquiring the best practices for teachers in the making. The authors recommend more effective support to equip student-teachers with quality subject-curriculum-pedagogic know-how for providing quality service when they join the teaching profession. In a similar vein on curriculum responsiveness, Kenneth Matengu, Nagula Iipumbu and Ngepathimo Kadhila in Chapter 10 demonstrate that HE curricula have undergone transformation over time to become responsive to economic needs. The authors elaborate that HE enhances career prospects and has a higher goal of promoting democracy, social justice and rationality. They advocate for quality HE curricula relevant to the needs of African societies while addressing the four forms of responsiveness: economic, social, disciplinary and student needs. The chapter concludes by recommending that the decolonisation discourse should be further emphasised in the responsiveness efforts in the curriculum so that a clear purpose is established. Similarly, Kofi Poku Quan-Baffour in Chapter 11, having stated that quality education requires a holistic curriculum that integrates indigenous knowledge systems, apprenticeship and quality teaching to ensure equity in access and human capital development, discusses some important indigenous practical knowledge and skills which Africans must gaze back to so as to reclaim from their past and integrate into the school curriculum the otherwise non-formal education programmes to ensure job creation and reduction in unemployment among the youth. The outline of the chapter includes an overview, introduction, a theoretical framework, non-formal education and some indigenous skills that can lead to self-employment.

In their quest to advance ‘sustainable futures in Africa’ and equate the status quo to doctoral research, Rebecca Nthogo Lekoko and Oitshepile MmaB Modise in Chapter 12 cite the latter in Africa as vulnerable owing to – among other reasons – lack of financial support for tuition, weak partnerships between industry and university, community and university, and a lack of centres of research excellence, including a lack of measures to buttress brain drain and ill-defined employability paths. The authors advocate for more effort in nurturing doctoral research studies as an indispensable strategy for addressing Africa’s sustainable development challenges; and call for the necessary requisites and engines with a clear vision. Meanwhile, Adebayo Tajudeen Sanni in Chapter 13 examines the challenges facing endogenous knowledge, education and research in Africa. He underlines that indigenous knowledge is resiliently local and thus poses a distinct contrast from the international, more impersonal system of knowledge prevalent in Africa, while education and research are the bedrock of global development. Academic institutions in Africa face obstacles in providing education, research and service in terms of the social, economic and political problems facing the continent, and in the context of globalisation. Accordingly, the author calls for a sensitivity of policy-makers and stakeholders regarding social re-engineering. In Chapter 14 Alfred Kitawi, looking at ‘futures thinking’ as an agenda for the African developmental university, observes that universities face many challenges – including poor teaching, limited research, poor management and governance – some of which are attributable to historical antecedents and others to the failure of the nation-state. He deplores the fact that since universities have the opportunity to improve governance through the use of new technologies and new thinking modes, the African developmental university should imbibe futures thinking in its overall structures, values, processes, outputs, leadership and governance: learning and parameters of quality assessment should include futuristic solutions to the problems facing communities.

Florence Itegi, in Chapter 15, rules that since universities are the epitome of learning they should emphasise developing intrinsic values and character development as one of their main goals. She castigates the lack of mentorship owing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Series editor’s introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Quality education in Eastern and Southern Africa – retrospectives and perspectives
• Part I Quality assurance discourses and challenges in higher education
• Part II Quality higher education and development
• Part III Quality education for social justice and societal development
• Part IV Quality assurance in transnational and international education
• Index