Quality Assurance in Higher Education Institutions: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

In these days of professional accountability, quality has become a limelight and a sine-qua-non for institutional existence; intrinsicneed to increase efficiency and effectiveness; and a change of institutional mission to meet the demands of ever competitive environment-information, and knowledge-based economy. This era, therefore, is a time of both opportunity and challenge for quality. As an opportunity, more people in many countries andmany cultures work on quality matters than ever before. This could be due to: a) the need to meet the increasing needs of the learners to be effective in this competitive world, demandingHigher Education Institutions (HEIs)to internationalize their programs; b) the need to expand Higher Education (HE); b) the need to paced with the international markets; c) the diminishing resources, but greater expectations from HEIs; and d) the need forflexible modes of educational provisions.Consequently, there is a demand for a shift of institutional research focus from a concentration on technical to contextual intelligence by empowering the key implementers (teachers) with the premise of informed doing so thatthey consider issues of what (descriptive science), what ought to be (normative science), and what events mean (interpretive of hermeneutical science) in carrying out institutional level assessment (Watson & Maddison, 2005 taking from Chan, 1993; Joshua, 1998, cited in Firdissa, 2006.a).