1. Quality Assurance of study programmes in Higher Education
Berit Eika, professor,
MD, PhD, MI, MHPE
Centre of Medical Education
Aarhus University

2. What is a good doctor? know’s much skills reflective person
good team worker
communicates well
good attitude
has life experience
empathic person
good problem-solver
good practice
financial expert
Ultimately good quality in education is about making good candidates. In my own setting that is making good doctors. And don't we all know what characterises a good doctor? We will at least be able to name a number of the characteristics of a good doctor. But the processes involved in the education and training of the future doctors – or any other university candidates – are very complex. Still we tend to think that ideally we will be able to control for all the variables and make an overarching evaluation of the programme.

3. Quality Assurance: Internal vs. External
Quality assurance serves two main purposes:
enhancement
accountability.
Internal quality assurance naturally focuses on the enhancement of quality in teaching and learning, while
External quality assurance, at its best, both serves the needs for accountability of institutions to stakeholders and the wider public and plays a developmental role for enhancing quality in institutions.
Is it like ENQA (the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher education) states that the internal quality assurance should focus on enhancement while the external focuses on accountability?
ENQA statement on the European Commission’s Report on Progress in Quality Assurance, 2010

4. ? EXTERNAL INTERNAL QUALITY CONTROL DEVELOPMENT CRITERIA PREREQISITS
ASSURANCE ?
CONTROL
DEVELOPMENT
CRITERIA
PREREQISITS
Or in other words: control as opposed to development?
That is well in accordance with looking at quality as a matter of meeting pre-set criteria as opposed to quality as a judgment of whether the HEIs have the prerequisites of handling quality assurance themselves.
Criteria sounds great BUT I definitely see a risk in this way of thinking quality assurance.
Problem 1 is that we might end up measuring what can be measured which is often numbers. Important numbers like dropout and grades but quality should be so much more, and often that more is much also more intangible.
Problem 2 – and I have seen this happen several times while I have served as a member of the Accreditation Council – and at the same time had inside information. The problem is that university people are smart and the HE institutions that are made up by many people are even smarter. Smart people learn what is takes to write or document the right things or things the right way . If this takes over all we got is a quality stamp machine or what I will call lip service. According to the dictionary lip service is: an expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction Shown in a little more humorous way:
EXPERTS
PEERS

5. What is quality? QUALITY Quality as something exceptional
Recruitment of the best and brightest students and faculty
Quality as “Value for money”
Low drop out, quick accomplishment, high employability
Quality as customer satisfaction
Student satisfaction, alumni satisfaction
Quality as meeting standards
Teacher-student ratio, research-based education as number of publications
Quality as transformation
Products of students learning (progress test)
I am sure that we all agree that we want Danish Education and therefore also higher education to have the highest possible quality. And it probably is a problem, that we assume that we all think the same when we talk about quality, since we may not have the same understanding of what ”quality” means.
I have put just a few possible understandings of quality in relation to study programmes up here to show that when we refer to quality we may refer to:
The exceptional notion of quality sees it as something special, as we do when we want to recruit the best students or best teachers to our programmes
Quality may also be understood as “Value for money” with indicators being i.e. drop out rates, how fast the students proceed through our education or how they succeed when they leave us assuming that there is some connection between what we do to the students and how they perform afterwards
Value might also be looked upon as satisfaction. That is an assumption underlying the most common way of assuring quality, the course evaluations

6. Quality assurance requires a multi-dimensional approach?
But since you are very clever – and know the underlying principle as well, I hope that you are able to follow and accept the application of the analogy when it comes to problem solving
“if you need a large force to accomplish a purpose, such as quality assurance, without harming healthy matters such as inner motivation and many costs; many, smaller forces applied simultaneously from different directions may work just as well or even better.”
QUALITY
ASSURANCE ?

7. Summary
We want quality but may not have the same understanding of what ”quality” is
We need a multi-dimensional, professional approach to quality assurance
There must be a good balance between:
Internal and external quality assurance
Development and accountability
Involvement of experts and peers
Costs and outcomes
We should be aware of – and avoid – side effects, such as:
Lack of commitment
Lip service