The Case of ISO 9000 Quality Management System Certification in a Faculty of a Turkish Public University

It is clear that ISO 9000 Quality Management System and Total Quality Management have an extensive literature. However, it is observed that the literature principally focuses on implementation consequences of them. In this study, ISO 9000 Quality Management System certification process in a faculty of a Turkish public university is taken into consideration. However, the study focuses on not only consequences of taking this certification but also its' triggers and processes. To examine these triggers, processes and consequences, data collection methods of the study were semi-structured interviews and unstructured participative observation. In addition, extensive amount of document was used to make triangulation.

Quality Management Practices in Lifelong Learning Programs at German Higher Education Institutions

This chapter gives an overview of quality management activities in German universities engaging in lifelong learning. Projects funded within the German-wide funding competition “Advancement through Education: Open Universities” aim to open universities to lifelong learning and to increase permeability between vocational and academic pathways. They range from development of concepts for part-time courses, further education and blended learning study formats to new kinds of cooperation with institutions outside university. Quality management activities have to be developed and implemented in all projects. The chapter presents the findings of an action research process including a quality management workshop with different universities involved in the funding competition and the resulting recommendation paper, complemented by a document analysis, which show the variety of quality assurance and quality management activities within academic continuing education in German higher education.

Higher Education at a Crossroads

The leadership needs to develop new organizational structures and systems that will promote and encourage quality learning and the ability to assess the impact of the teaching. Governments across the world have steadily minimized their support for public higher education, and costs associated with gaining a degree have increased constantly over the last decade. Most universities are forced to adopt a restructuring model for commoditizing education to make a profit from large numbers of students. The road ahead for higher education is filled with challenges, risks and uncertainties that begin with education being valued as more than a simple commodity: education becomes a public good. Higher education is increasingly viewed as a major instrument of economic development. In order to hold universities accountable despite limited governmental budgets, many nations have adopted performance-based university research funding strategies for targeted programs.

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Capitalism has promoted and requires the growing knowledge of entrepreneurs, creative people who have the ability to solve problems in the form of innovation. The types of enterprises they create can be social, public and private. By creating an enterprising company new products and new production methods can be introduced, new markets are open, new sources of raw materials and inputs are developed and new market structures in an industry are created. Entrepreneurship can be taught, the question is how to do it. Teaching entrepreneurship should go beyond the business plan. It proposes a form that overcomes the mistakes found by the author in two research studies in 2008 and 2014 in the programs of management in Bogotá.

Bridging Theory and Practice

This chapter focuses on reflective learning in higher education as central point of reference in answering to the social demands and the ongoing changes in modern societies. Empirical basis is a two and a half year study with a group of students in different master's programs at a University for Professional Studies and interviews with teachers who are teaching in master's programs of professional studies. The chapter presents a concept of reflective learning that values the students' practice and expertise as professionals and provides ways to further develop and transform this practice into new contexts. Hence, the productive linkage between academic ways of knowing and professional ways of knowing and the development of students as reflective practitioners are central elements.

Roadmap to Ensure the Consistency of WIL with the Projects of Companies and Learners

The challenge for Higher Education providers is first to guarantee flow and satisfaction of stakeholders; thus funding. Therefore, any training device has to ensure consistency with learners' projects; i.e. adaptability to individuals and companies if one considers lifelong learning. Second, training should satisfy a set of quality criteria and be cost efficient. The key factors are the joint design of the training (required skills), adapted monitoring of the realization (control, follow-up, corrective action, support) with continuous adjustment and joint assessment. But, the keystone is the training of the parties (among whom the tutors and mentors) to develop innovative pedagogical devices. The expected roadmap is presented to create sustainable training projects that meaningfully integrate past and current work experience to develop learning abilities. These prospects put questions to pedagogical teams and executive boards about the lifetime of specific trainings and potential transferability of the core business (skilled workforce, leading model).

The Impact of Cost Sharing on Quality of Education in Egypt's Public Universities

Egypt government undertook forward steps to reform higher education financing by introducing cost sharing policies in public universities; however, the government did not take into consideration the urgency for developing monitoring and evaluation systems to measure the effects of such policies on the quality of education. This chapter aims to measure the impact of cost sharing policy on quality of education in “FLIP”, the underlying assumption of the research is that ‘tuition fees' as a form of user charge would result in increasing education quality, which will accordingly shrink the transition period between work and school by conducting an ex-post policy evaluation design due to the absence of baseline surveys. The research study eventually comes to an end that introducing the cost sharing policy in the form of FLIP in public universities has no significant effect on quality as fitness of purpose. Finally this chapter recalls for accompanying cost sharing policies in Egypt with value creation in quality rather than only diversifying the income sources beyond the government budget.

Creating a Value Added College Environment

This chapter explores how colleges and universities have struggled to define who they are and what they are responsible for doing. From the understanding that society increasingly equated educated with employed and highly compensated, the discussion traces the formal and informal education student receive on a college campus. Extending the idea of a formal curriculum to the ‘hidden curriculum,' that is, the unintended learning and experiences students encounter on campus. The hidden curriculum can play an important role in the student development process, and in many cases, has become the de facto value-added experience on campus. College policy makers and leaders can use the hidden curriculum to their advantage in working with students, but must first take the step of creating expectations for this curriculum and align their activities with their projected outcomes.

Integrative Learning toward Social Responsibility in Teaching Engineering

Technical University of Madrid, within the Spanish context, has profited of the introduction of a System of Internal Quality Assurance to build a road on the grounds of previous work on the culture of ethics in engineering. This way may drive the students training to incorporate in their curricula instruments leading to the recognition and acquisition of social responsibility. The road is paved with various educational elements, either mandatory such as the Mentoring project (aiming to minimize the gap in the transit between high school and university from a logistical point of view), or optional such a set of three: Monitoring (a system of academic support for improving the performance of in the students in their learning outcomes when face difficulties), Service Learning and Social Entrepreneurship, Ethics and Values in Engineering. This strategy combined with the convergence to the European Higher Education Area allows the selection of students able to integrate in their professional assets the idea and the commitment of making the human development more sustainable.

Quality Assurance for a Developmental “Global Studies” (GS) Curriculum

This chapter focuses on quality assurance (QA) for cutting-edge transdisciplinary university curricula. As a case study, it analyzes the developmental, internationally- and peace-oriented “Global Studies” (GS) curriculum at Graz University, Austria. Based on an extensive literature review on concepts of quality for curricula, key concepts for transdisciplinarity and approaches for quality monitoring are provided. This analysis finds and emphasizes that QA criteria are highly dependent on the stakeholders' perspective; notably on the perspectives of lecturers, students, university administration, and external auditors. Based on several practical sets of such stakeholder-dependent QA criteria, quality in the Graz-based GS curriculum is assessed thoroughly. Detailed recommendations for quality enhancement are provided by students, lecturers and external auditors with a focus on: transdisciplinarity; relevance to practice; maintaining existing levels of academic requirements; and especially sound, sufficient and sustained funding by the university administration.