Conclusions from Working Group 4: Improving Educational Quality for a Diverse Student Body

1. Conclusions from Working Group 4:Improving Educational Quality for a Diverse Student Body Chair: Judith Eaton President Council for Higher Education Accreditation USA

2. Introduction • Academic quality has been a shared responsibility within institutions for most of the history of universities • Academic quality has been based on a set of values: • trust • link between teaching and research • institutional autonomy and academic freedom • HE as a public good and serving the public interest

3. Recent developments • Greater intrusion of governments at national, regional and international levels represents a threat to academic values because: • bureaucratic and over-regulatory approach • HE as a private good and students as customers • This approach can lead to: • standardisation in a context where HE must address conflicting demands and a diversity of needs • compliance and loss of HE’s ownership of quality • loss of quality

4. How do institutions sustain ownership of academic quality? • Respond to globalisation through: • Rethinking “liberal-arts” education and re-stating its importance • Educating global citizens while contributing to the local community • Respond to massification through: • Developing appropriate sustainable practices for our work with students: e.g., Teaching methods that combine personalised learning paths within a team project • Understanding better the diversity of students and using its richness in the classroom • Respond to accountability demands by developing internal quality processes of all programmes and activities

5. How do institutions sustain ownership of academic quality? • Assert the university as the appropriate forum for continued reflection and dialogue on academic values as part of a strategy to sustain our academic quality • Ensure a QA role for institutions at national level • Pursue a supranational, mutual recognition approach: EUA must play a role in facilitating the interface of national processes • Embrace diversity of institutional missions and standards and avoid a single set of quality standards

6. Conclusion What did higher education do before government QA procedures?