More research on quality assurance in HE needed – Study

More research is necessary on key elements of quality assurance policy and practice in Sub-Saharan African universities, including internationalisation, the establishment of industry collaborations, the monitoring of examinations, strengthening of academic administrative systems and the accreditation of programmes.

Quality assurance as a feature of higher education should also be promoted more vigorously, according to a study ‘A decade of quality assurance in higher education (QAiHE) within Sub-Saharan Africa: A literature review based on a systematic search approach’ published in the Higher Education Journal on 23 June.

The paper was authored by Dr Dickson Mireku, a research fellow in the directorate of academic planning and quality assurance, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana, and Dr Brandford Bervell, a senior lecturer, the coordinator of the quality assurance and enhancement unit at UCC’s college of distance education, and the deputy director of the directorate of research, innovation and consultancy at the UCC.

“Quality assurance in higher education matters for producing human resources capacity for developing the SSA [Sub-Saharan] continent,” the authors said.

The study included a selection of 143 publications in the period from 2012 to 2022 that were written in English and are related to academic quality assurance research, including strategies, methods, challenges and the promotion thereof in higher education institutions and universities at both the Sub-Saharan African and country levels. The aim was to identify internal and external mechanisms put in place for improving the quality of university education.

“The identification of how and what have been done to improve QA [quality assurance] in higher education institutions will be helpful in several ways, such as creating [the] opportunity for institutions in the sub-region to learn from challenges and adopt the documented experiences of the successful higher education institutions,” the authors noted.

Professor Juma Shabani, the director of the doctoral school at the University of Burundi and the former director of development, coordination and monitoring of UNESCO programmes with a special focus on Africa, told University World News: “Any study that analyses quality assurance policies and practices in higher education in Africa is important, since it can help to improve the implementation of various quality assurance initiatives in Africa, such as the improvement of accreditation and quality assurance standards, the development of competency-based curricula that necessarily involve the various stakeholders, including industry, as well as the harmonisation of programmes and quality assurance mechanisms.”

Outcome of the study

The study found only eight publications concentrated on the promotion of quality assurance in the broader African context; four articles were focused on the entire Sub-Saharan Africa and five articles covered quality assurance as a general topic in East Africa.

The top 10 countries in terms of the number of quality assurance studies are: Ghana (21 articles), Namibia (15), Botswana (11), Rwanda (10) and Nigeria (nine), followed by Kenya and Ethiopia (eight articles each), Malawi (seven) and Zimbabwe and Cameroon (six articles each).

Based on the total number of citations counted, the most relevant articles on quality assurance promotion showed that visible articles are mainly on procedures, practices and strategies for dealing with the quality assurance challenges, reducing massification, and the training of human resources to support academic and administrative works.

The study revealed that internationalisation, the establishment of industry collaborations, the monitoring of examinations, the strengthening of academic administrative systems and the accreditation of programmes and courses are key quality assurance indicators but are under-researched.

“Not many publications touched on these topics, observably; these areas have not been promoted enough,” notes the study.

“This is an indication that, by and large, the concept of quality assurance promotion is not visible enough in the Sub-Saharan educational management landscape,” the study points out.

For example, with reference to internationalisation and the building of industrial collaboration, only one study was published on each topic. This indicated that the majority of higher education sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa operated with “local ideas only” and did not devise strategies for getting ideas to design and improve programmes that would equip students with employer-demanded skills.

The study revealed that there was no standardised quality-assurance framework for assessing the extent to which quality teaching and learning have been promoted in higher education institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

An assessment of the challenges revealed recurring themes, such as insufficient funding, the lack of efficient academic staff, poor implementation of educational policies, and unstructured programmes for the training and re-training of staff to be the major hindrances in the achievement of quality standards in teaching and learning, according to the study.

Recommendations

Based on the literature, the study put forward several recommendations for policy, practice, and future research in higher education delivery in the Sub-Saharan region:

• Quality assurance experts should increase their efforts in publishing and providing recommendations for improving quality assurance in African higher education institutions because of the decline of publications in the past two years (2020-22);

• Authorities and the managers of higher education institutions and non-governmental organisations should provide funds and logistics for academics and researchers to undertake more surveys on under-researched quality assurance indicators;

• A continental-based study is needed to harmonise issues related to the promotion of assurance promotion in higher education institutions for the entire Sub-Saharan Africa region. “Such a study might help in the designing of holistic policies to adequately deal with the continent-wide challenges such as massification and low infrastructural development,” the study explains.

• The low visibility of efforts to promote quality assurance must be improved;

• More research has to be done to predict possible future challenges that may disrupt higher education systems;

• Studies must be carried out on practices and strategies for developing standardised quality assurance frameworks for assessing the performance of higher education institutions in promoting quality assurance;

• Following the advice of the Association of African Universities to give special attention to holistic quality improvement strategies, including the improvement of student support services, building strong teaching strategy and admission systems, ensuring proper course accreditation and properly managing innovation to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (quality education).

Additional measures

In addition, Shabani said that, to improve quality assurance in Africa, higher education institutions should strive to use e-learning and video conferencing platforms in order to provide learners with access to international experts, virtual libraries and laboratories and quality open-educational resources.

Furthermore, Bervell, co-author of the study, told University World News that the main message of the paper for policymakers in Africa for advancing higher quality assurance are the following:

• A policy on internationalisation for higher education institutions is needed in order to exchange best practices that position Africa on a par with other continents in terms of quality higher education. This promotes the acceptance of graduates from Africa in other parts of the world.

• A policy on academia-industry collaboration to co-create curriculums that becomes useful to society is critical. This could ensure that there is no variance between what the higher educational institutions offer and what industry players require from graduates.

• Integrity of examinations ensures validity and reliability of certificates. Therefore, policies on examination monitoring mechanisms should be strict, and effectively implemented.

• Academic staff recruitment should be strategic towards hiring staff possessing the requisite skills (and not just PhD certificates) to teach in tertiary institutions. In addition, structured continuous compulsory capacity-building should be a characteristic of training and development divisions of higher educational institutions in Africa.

“Quality assurance should not be an office, but a practice in higher education institutions in Africa. Authorities should intentionally see the need to channel adequate funds towards implementation of quality assurance measures,” Bervell pointed out.

“Finally, educational policies should not end on papers and shelves, but [be] vigorously implemented through continuous monitoring frameworks by the regulatory bodies of higher educational institutions in Africa,” he said.