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Transforming Quality: The Seventh Quality in Higher Education International Seminar
Track 3: What has been the transformative impact of external quality monitoring ?
Quality Audit as a Catalyst for Change
Jon Haakstad, Network Norway Council, Norway,
Kirsten Hofgaard Lycke, University of Oslo, Norway,
Berit Askling, Göteborg University, Sweden,
Ola Stave, Oslo School of Architecture, Norway.
19 Feb 2003
Outline
Purpose
The purpose of our paper is to discuss under what conditions external monitoring might have an impact on the quality of the basic higher education functions, that is, teaching, learning and knowledge production.
Instead of questioning the whole quality monitoring movement as being too costly, too much controlling and too little improvement-oriented, as are standpoints taken by many academic staff members, we want to explore the potential for external quality monitoring to have a positive influence on the inner life of the institutions, and thus also perhaps to have impact on the core functions teaching and learning and knowledge production: in our opinion important aspects of the professionalisation of institutional leadership and management. .
Our point of departure is taken in recent experiences from a pilot project at four volunteer Norwegian higher education institutions. The purpose of the project was to try out a national system of quality audit, encompassing guidelines for the institutions to generate documentation on quality-related data as well as a model for site visits and for audit reports. The audits aim at evaluating how the institutions accomplish their responsibility for quality assurance and quality work, however in a way that addresses the internal capacity of the institution and motivates efforts at self-improvement and institutional learning (Haakstad, 2001).
A framework
The concern for quality in higher education since the beginning of the 1990s is evidently a consequence of ongoing changes in state- university relationship and increasing external pressure on higher education. National systems of quality monitoring have been established with a focus on outcomes in terms of academic standard (assessments and evaluations) or leadership and management procedures (audits).
Traditional notions of institutional leadership and academic autonomy are challenged by the expectations that are put on strong institutional leadership and ‘new public management’ influenced management (Altbach and Chait, 2000). The risk for bureaucratisation has been pointed out (Trow, 1996) and well as compliance and sense of distrust among academic staff members (Henkel, 1999). It is also questioned whether external monitoring actually has any transformative impact on student learning, (reports from ‘The End of Quality?’ Seminar in 2001).
The concern for quality also reflects changes that directly affect the inner life of higher education. As was pointed out by Askling (1997), although external quality monitoring may act as a catalyst and encourage institutions not just to establish routines for management of quality but for elaborating infrastructure for quality enhancement, the introduction of various forms of external monitoring (assessment, audits, etc) is itself a response to changes that are exerting great direct and indirect impact on institutions. More students, new categories of students, renewal of programmes and courses, new demands of the so called third task, and besides, restrictions in state funding and reliance on external funding, are structural changes that inevitably have impact on the inner life of the institutions, on curricula, teaching and learning. (Bauer et al., 1999). By mapping out the complexity of the teaching and learning processes in higher education and the wider context of the system Horsburgh (1999) argues that there are far more factors impacting on innovation in curriculum, teaching and learning than external quality monitoring.
Thus, what is important, in our opinion, is to discuss in what ways and under what conditions curriculum, learning and teaching might be improved and what is the potential for external quality monitoring to act as a catalyst in such processes.
Among external quality monitoring activities, put into practice in many countries and aiming at meeting new governmental (sometimes also public and student) demands on accountability and quality control, academic audit seems to have the potential of meeting many of the expectations on external control at the same time as it might support improvement (Dill, 2000).
Higher education institutions are concerned with learning but as organisations they are not always as good at learning as one might expect (York, 2000). Ideas have been launched of the university becoming an adaptive organisation (Dill and Sporn, 1995; Sporn 1999) or a learning organisation (Ramsden, 1998) in order to promote internal innovation capacity and flexibility for meeting new demands on efficiency and effectiveness.
Thus, a development towards more transparent documentations about the organisation itself may, it is argued, promote improvements within institutions and result in better dissemination of good practice. It might ‘empower’ students and academic staff members as they get more informed about the characteristics, conditions, processes and outcomes of their own organisations (Askling and Kristensen, 2000). By combining a bottom-up and a top-down approach to quality monitoring and by combining internal and external audits a new collegialism might emerge that foster an improvement-oriented culture (Harvey, 1995). Kristensen (1997) emphasises the cultural developmental power of the audit when arguing that external monitoring can never stand alone and can never replace internal quality monitoring.
Our findings
We have clear indications that audits with a supportive approach initiates processes within the organisation, improve the horizontal and vertical interchange within the organisation and thus, has the potential for foster a develop-oriented culture. However, we have also indications from our four site visits that there is a long way to go before the institutions have developed the characteristics of a transparent, learning organisation.
We will report our findings under the following headings:
· The Norwegian model of quality assurance
· About quality work and suspected lack of quality
· About leadership and organisation
· The implementation of national audits
Discussion and conclusions
We believe that a development-oriented national system of academic audits may have the potential for encouraging the institutions to adopt a system perspective, to develop their own strategies and routines for organisational learning, to redefine the concept decentralisation in terms of ‘shared responsibilities’ instead of ‘freedom to everyone to protect individual academic autonomy’, and to give the students a defined role in the internal quality work. External quality monitoring might offer conceptual tools and basic facts for internal debate about the nature and purpose of higher education, effective teaching and learning and the use of student perspectives in the shaping of programmes and curricula and, thus, promote changes in academic culture and in practice.
However, to create such changes, we agree with Dill (2000) that the views of faculty members must be actively considered and institutional trust in the integrity of the process must be developed. We also agree with Askling and Stensaker (forthcoming) that there is a potential danger of advocating just ‘strong’ academic leadership in the more managerial sense of the word. Instead, academic leadership ought to be considered a process of social interaction guiding individuals and groups towards particular goals (Middlehurst 1999).
References
Altbach, P. and Chait, R., 2000, (Eds.) ‘Special issue on the changing academic workplace: comparative perspectives’, Higher Education. 41 (1), p. 2.
Askling, B, 1997, ‘Quality monitoring as an institutional enterprise’, Quality in Higher Education, 3(1), pp. 1 –26.
Askling, B. and Stensaker, B. (forthcoming) ‘Academic leadership: prescriptions, practises and paradoxes’, Tertiary Education and Management (forthcoming).
Bauer, M., Askling, B., Gerard–Marton, S. and Marton, F., 1999, Transforming Universities. Changing patterns of governance, structure and learning in Swedish higher education (London, Jessica Kingsley).
Dill, D., 1999, ‘Academic accountability and university adaptation: the architecture on an academic learning organization’, Higher Education, 38, pp,.127–54.
Dill, D., 2000, Designing academic audit: lessons learned in Europe and Asia, Quality in Higher Education, 6(3) pp. 187–207.
Dill, D. and Sporn, B., 1995 (Eds.), Emerging Patterns of Social Demand and University Reform: Through a Glass Darkly (New York, Pergamon).
Haakstad, J., 2001, ‘Accreditation: the new quality assurance formula? Some reflections as Norway is about to reform its quality assurance system’, Quality in Higher Education 7(1), pp. 77–82.
Harvey, L., 1995, ‘The new collegialism: improvement with accountability’, Tertiary Education and Management, 1(2) pp.153–60.
Henkel, M., 2000, Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education (London, Jessica Kingsley).
Horsburgh, M., 1999, ‘Quality monitoring in higher education: the impact on student learning’, Quality in Higher Education 5(1) pp. 9–26.
Kristensen, B.,1997, ‘The impact of quality monitoring on institutions: a Danish experience at the Copenhagen Business School’, Quality in Higher Education, 3(1), pp. 87–94.
Middlehurst, R.,1999, ‘New realities for leadership and governance in higher education’, Tertiary Education and Management 5(4) pp. 307–29.
Ramsden, P.,1998, Learning to Lead in Higher Education (London, Routledge).
Sporn, B., 1999, Adaptive University Structures. An analysis of adaptation to socioeconomic environments of US and European Universities, (London, Jessica Kingsley).
Stensaker, B., 2000, ‘Quality as discourse: an analysis of external audit reports in Sweden 1995 – 1998’, Tertiary Education and Management. 6(4), pp. 305–17.
York, M., 2000, ‘Developing a quality culture in higher education’, Tertiary Education and Management, 6(1), pp. 19–36.
Information about the authors
Berit Askling, member of the audit team
Professor in Education at Department of Education and Didactics, Göteborg University, Sweden and also Secretary General at the Committee of Educational Research at the Swedish Research Council. Former Vice Rector for quality affairs, and former Dean of School of Education.
The research field is ‘Higher education’, in particular such themes as ‘Impacts of reforms’, ‘The changing university’, ‘The academic profession: evolving roles in diverse contexts’ and ‘Institutional governance’.
Jon Haakstad, project leader of the pilot project
Cand.phil. is a senior adviser at the Network Norway Council, Dept of Quality Assurance and Development. His work has concentrated in particular on matters of accreditation and quality assurance systems in higher education and on institutional evaluations of universities. He was formerly an assistant professor and subsequently rector at Tromsö College of Education and served for two years as the executive manager of Norway’s National Council for Teacher Education. He has published on English literature, British history and quality issues in higher education.
Kirsten Hofgaard Lycke, chairman of the audit team
Professor in Education at Institute for Educational Research, University of Oslo, Norway. Dr.polit.
Current research is focused on quality of studies and learning environments in academia and in the workplace, an example is the participation in the national research group for the European Comission project ‘Students as journeymen between communities of higher education and work’ (2001-2004) in collaboration with Polish, German and Swedish universities. As professor at the Unversity of Oslo Lycke is involved in educational innovations in general and in the university’s adaption to the current national quality reform in particular.
Ola Stave, member of the audit team
Director General, Oslo School of Architecture. Former head of research department at Norwegian Building Research Institute, responsible for quality assurance and accreditation. Former president of Norwegian association for quality assurance and leadership. Main results was that Norwegian Model for Quality Management Systems for the building and construction industry is the basis for similar development in the Netherlands, Finland and Iceland.