The legislative requirements for measuring quality in transnational education : understanding divergence while maintaining standards
- Authors: Bentley, Duncan , Henderson, Fiona , Lim, Choon
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Higher Education Quarterly Vol. 71, no. 4 (2017), p. 338-351
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Australian universities have been actively engaged in transnational education since the 1990s. The challenges of assuring quality have seen a changing regulatory framework increasingly designed to ensure equivalence of standards wherever a course of study is offered and however it is delivered. Transnational Higher Education has grown significantly and the issues that flow from operating across jurisdictions, cultures and contexts have been addressed primarily by institutions themselves in complying with regulation. This article identifies how the Australian quality agency TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) has revised its Standards Framework to support divergence appropriate to local culture and context, while assuring quality provision across the student life cycle. It concludes that the maturity of the quality agency may not yet reflect the provision of transnational education in practice. The article identifies a need for significant further research so that theory and practice can reflect opportunities to better serve students in a mature quality environment. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Equivalent or not? : Beyond measuring teaching and learning standards in a transnational education environment
- Authors: Lim, Chooey , Bentley, Duncan , Henderson, Fiona , Pan, Shin , Balakrishnan, Vimala
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Quality Assurance in Education Vol. 24, no. 4 (2016), p. 528-540
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine issues academics at importing institutions face while delivering Australian degrees in Malaysia. Transnational higher education (TNE) has been widely researched. However, less widely researched is the area of understanding what academics at the offshore locations need to uphold the required academic standards of their partnered exporting universities. This area warrants close attention if Australian and other transnational education universities are to sustain their growth through a partnership model with offshore academics delivering a portion (often a substantial portion) of the teaching. Design/methodology/approach: Two focus groups were conducted with a mix of long standing and newly recruited Malaysian lecturers who taught into an Australian degree through a partnership arrangement. The semi-structured questions which were used were derived from a preliminary literature review and previous internal institutional reports. Findings: The findings from the focus groups indicate that TNE is largely “Australian-centric” when addressing the standard of academic quality and integrity. The findings pointed not so much to any sustained internationalisation of curriculum or administration or personnel but more as internationalisation as deemed required by the local academic. Originality/value: To a greater extent, the findings highlighted that equivalent student outcomes do not necessarily equate to equivalent learning experiences or teaching workload. In fact, the frustration of the interviewees on the tension to fulfil the home institution curriculum and helping students to “comprehend” an Australian-centric curriculum translates to “additional and unrecognised workload” for the interviewees. © 2016, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Duncan Bentley” is provided in this record**