Enforcing quality in higher education

Enforcing quality in higher education is considered a very important area to be addressed by the academia. Apropos to quality in higher education, there are several issues that need to be resolved.

The primary issue is ascertaining the delivery of quality in higher education. Is this being determined through the number of employed graduates or are there other career achievements, which constitute the baseline for determining the delivery of quality in higher education? Another issue is the determination of the ideal graduate. Is this being determined while keeping in focus character education or through the measurement of knowledge outcomes only? Another issue is the cultivation of technical and general expertise.

Van Damme, D. in his paper ‘Quality Assurance in an International Environment: National and International Interests and Tensions’ described quality as a definition having no “growing” consensus. Van Damme further argued that despite having numerous systems of quality assurance and possible criteria, there must exist a “concept of academic quality that recognises variety and diversity”.

Unlike quality assurance parameters being employed in industrial domains, quality assurance parameters in higher education need to be both qualitative and quantitative. Student satisfaction, induction of ethical and moral content, professional and teaching competence of faculty members, the working environment of faculty and administrative staff, remunerations for faculty members, effective and demand oriented curriculum design, academia liaison with industry, timely and effective coursework and teacher evaluations, availability of updated text and reference material and degree of access to novel studies are some of the important qualitative parameters that need to be focused in parallel to quantitative parameters such as the student-teacher ratio, lecture capacity, laboratory and library venues and magnitude of computing and related equipment.

Carrying the assessment of the degree of student satisfaction is dependent upon the variables that directly effect students. In Astin’s (1993) book, What Matters in College, the author investigated five such variables, namely, career development, learning ecologies, student beliefs, values and attitudes that impact student satisfaction in college. Albeit private sector institutions imparting higher education in Pakistan are concentrating in maximizing students’ satisfaction, most of the public sector institutions and universities are still far off from providing even the most basic ingredients for maximizing student’s satisfaction.

It must be realised that student satisfaction cannot only be achieved through improving teaching methodology. There are several other complex parameters apart from teaching methodology. Some of these parameters include student-centred instructional resources and methodology, the student’s life on campus, personal, career and academic counseling, stress management and relevance of the coursework to everyday life. Numerous studies have concluded that student satisfaction and retention in an institute delivering higher education are directly proportional to each other.

Induction of ethical and moral content in the overall scheme of study is another important ingredient for enforcing quality in higher education. Higher educational institutions should be acting as bastions of ethical conduct. They should be a place where the students can determine and practice their personal ethics code that will guide them in their professional and personal lives. The decisions being made within the administration of higher education institutions are not only decisions affecting the entire academic community including faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders, but are the models of ethical consideration for all involved, and should serve as examples for overall society.

Higher education has the role of equipping students with ethical values, including the underlying concepts, analytical skills to assist in making sound judgment required for decision making, a comprehensive overview of ethical norms and nomenclature, and a sense of responsibility towards the academic community in specific and society in general.

In this context each classroom will not only be acting as a place for acquiring and sharing knowledge but also a laboratory for practicing the process of decision making, and of analytically assessing trade offs related to the workplace, interpersonal relationships and personal lives. Unfortunately most of the traditional public universities in Pakistan are infected with the politics syndrome. This syndrome exists both within faculty and student communities. A once leading public sector information technology institution in Lahore fell victim to such politics and instead of becoming a centre of excellence, it became a den of devouring politics. The private sector, which was once immune to this syndrome, has also started getting affected. For establishing an ethical environment, it is rudimentary for both the public and the private sector to vaccinate their institutions against the politics syndrome by administrating the dose of honesty, respect, justice and accountability.

Effective and demand-oriented curriculum design is one of the most important steps in inducing quality in higher education. Curriculum as defined by Daniel Tanner (1980) is “the planned and guided learning experiences and intended learning outcome, formulated through the systematic reconstruction of knowledge and experiences, under the auspices of the school, for the learners’ continuous and willful growth in personal social competence.”

Through various studies, the definition of “curriculum” can be further extended as body of knowledge aimed at the needs and demands of specific learners entailing detailed procedures for implementation.

Ralph W. Tyler signifies three areas to be addressed while designing a curriculum. These are the “nature and structure of knowledge”, “need of the society” and “need of the learner”. Ralph also proposed the assessment of the specific educational purposes to be attained, educational experiences for the attainment of these purposes, organisation of these experiences and degree to which the purposes are attained.

Based upon Ralph Model for designing curriculum, Madeus, G.F., & Stufflebeam, D.L. (1989), developed an inverted pyramid for illustrating the curriculum development process. The pyramid starts with the presentation of philosphy of education leading towards goals and aims, thus establishing general instructional objectives resulting into specefic instructional objectives and outcomes, resulting into task analysis, content selection and learning activities.

It is a common practice that at the time of course allocation, the teachers are asked to develop course content. They usually develop it through accessing the table of contents of the textbook without the assessment of any learning outcomes and then present it to their students. If we carefully analyse the Tylor model, content selection is among the last stages of curriculum design.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has done a commendable job by providing curriculum guidelines and standards to all public and private sector institutions, having flexibility for change in accordance to the needs and demands of the learner, industry and the overall society.

Enforcing quality in higher education is also not possible without the adequate assessment of the professional and teaching competence of the faculty. It must be realised that it is not necessary that an expert in a particular domain is an expert teacher of that domain also. It is also not necessary that a faculty member adept in teaching undergraduate courses will always be adept in teaching post-graduate courses.

Traditionally in most of the public and private sector higher education institutions in Pakistan, a teacher is assessed after course allocation. And this assessment is made either near the midterm examination or immediately after it. In principal, a teacher’s teaching and professional competencies should be assessed before the course is allocated. In this regard, Pearson’s model for assessing teacher’s competencies suggests three parameters for assessing a competent teacher.

These are standards for teaching the content satisfactorily, the skills required for meeting the standards and the degree of possession of the required skills. During course allocation, a grid based on these three parameters can be constructed along with the appropriate weights for various standards and skills. This will help in the quantification of the qualitative competencies, which will further enable the making of rational and ethical decisions. It is important to realise that course allocation is the most pivotal procedure and must not be based upon arbitrary grounds.

The working environment for faculty and administration staff also constitutes as an important ingredient in the overall recipe for enforcing quality in higher education. The working environment should be conducive for promoting effective teaching, scholarly gains and community sharing of knowledge resources. It must be realised that faculty being the most fragile and sensitive element of any higher educational institution, are deputed with the most daunting task of educating pupils, leading towards the progress of their careers. Hence an environment based upon mutual respect, professional norms, adequate remuneration and career growth is necessary for flourishing intellectual efforts.

In the present era, higher educational institutions are not only places for imparting education but in actual centres for creating enterprise knowledge and solutions to the problems of industry. Hence it is empirical for higher educational institutions to develop multi-purpose liaison with the industry in order to ascertain the problem areas of the industrial stakeholders and assessment of appropriate solution.

As in charge of the industrial liaison programme at one of the leading public institutions, I had the chance to interact with small and medium-sector enterprises for the assessment of their information technology needs in 2001. It was interesting to note that approximately 85 per cent of the sector was requiring information technology solutions and demanded for the institutions assistance. As a result they were provided both solutions, which in turn created the demand of the manpower to execute those solutions. In this way all the graduates of fall 2001 of that institution were provided jobs by the industry.

Some academicians argue that industry is not demanding solutions from the higher education institutions. In my humble opinion, the academic institutions are not really trying to assess the industry needs and are just engaged in delivering lectures. Developing industrial liaison programmes are pivotal for the achievement of the quality goal in higher education.

Higher education institutions in Pakistan have ample opportunities to excel due to the availability of students with abilities to conceive and work. It is to be realised that keeping in view the literacy rate, the students registering for higher education have enormous potential as they reached this level of education after a tedious journey anyway. Their potential only needs to be utilised in a planned and progressive way. We the members of the academic community have the responsibility to show them the right direction at the right time so that they can harness their abilities for achieving greater national interest.

The article is written by Farhan S. Shiraza, who is a senior lecturer/research fellow at the National Centre of Maritime Policy Research, Karachi.  Source: http://www.dawn.com/weekly/education/archive/081012/education2.htm