We’ve got a provincial election in Ontario in something like 100 days (as if Omicron and Ukraine weren’t depressing enough), so I thought I would put out a policy suggestion with respect to higher education that all parties could follow, if they were so inclined. Specifically, a suggestion with how to promote quality in universities.
To give you a little bit of background, in Ontario “quality assurance” takes one of two forms. If you are a new organization trying to offer degree-level programming, you have to go through a process called an “organizational review” run by the Post-Secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB), which basically tests whether or not the people trying to run a university are fit and proper persons who understand how to ensure quality in all of the university’s various functions (you may recall this was the hurdle at which the thoroughly vile Charles McVety fell in his bid to launch a degree-granting university last year). You also have to re-submit to this process at regular intervals thereafter. If, on the other hand, you are an institution which has been given a legislative charter to offer degrees, you can do more or less what the hell you want because it is assumed that you have competent internal governance structures to oversee both programs and services and general governance issues and…not now, Laurentian, not now!
Some may chafe at this description. They may point to the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies (OCGS) and the Ontario Universities Council on Quality Assurance (OUCQA), and express positive sentiments for the impact these bodies have on the system. And to some extent they would be right: both do exert some upwards pressure on the quality of academic programs in the province. But let’s be clear about three things with these organizations:
- Neither is truly external: both run by the universities themselves, which gives rise to questions about how tough they can truly be on institutions. From a governance perspective this a massive outlier (in national terms, too – equivalent bodies in BC, Alberta and the Maritimes are all responsible to government rather than universities).
- Both of them assume that “quality” is only something that relates to academic programming. Of the major university missions, that only leaves out student affairs, libraries, the entire system of academic support, the research mission, technology/knowledge transfer, the community development mission…I could go on, but you get the idea. This at least is consistent with practices in other provinces, but it is massively at odds with international practice, where accreditation or quality assurance practices are much more likely to look at the “whole” university
- In both cases, they are about trying to uphold minimum standards. That’s obviously not a bad thing, but it’s not the only thing external quality agencies can do. In addition to this, they can try for quality enhancement – that is, creating sustained momentum to improve quality across institutions. For a good example of a quality-enhancement agency, I would point to the Quality Assurance Agency Scotland and its use of “enhancement themes” to drive collaborative efforts across all institutions on specific areas of institutional improvements (e.g. “flexible delivery”, “the first year”). And it’s not done in a top-down fashion – institutions themselves contribute to the definition of themes and work mostly gets done through the creation of inter-institutional networks of people who want to spread good practice (of note also is the role students are invited to play in this process, which is a really good idea).
So, in brief: if enhancing quality in higher education is something your political party might be interested in – why not consider creating a quality assurance agency with a quality enhancement that which encompasses the entirety of university functions rather than just academic programs? If you’re Liberal or New Democrat, you could consider it an alternative to performance-based funding; if you’re a Conservative, you could consider it an addition (they are by no means mutually exclusive). Either way, it’s something new, positive and with a proven track record in another jurisdiction.
Ontario universities will be unlikely to applaud this approach, mainly because most of them hate anything that they don’t control or invent locally. This is not a province where institutions collaborate out of instinct. But that’s not the point: the point of using quality assurance frameworks to enhance quality is to embed the practice of collaboration and idea-sharing at the level within each institution’s normal processes. In theory, of course, institutions could do this on their own, in the way the University Innovation Alliance does in the United States. But unfortunately, Ontario institutions aren’t quite that fabulous, and a push from the outside might do a world of good.
So that’s my free policy idea for any party to adopt. And not just in Ontario – other provinces can also profit from this kind of approach. Tougher to work on in the smaller provinces, but even there the maritime provinces at least have at least a basis to try this as a common approach.
Oh no, wait, I actually have a second free policy idea – a public inquiry on Laurentian. There you go, two ideas for the price of one.
Have a good weekend.
Note: the blog will be off next week. See you on March 7th.
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The closing argument seems to be that quality enhancement and quality assurance are peas from the same pod that can somehow be grafted together. Not likely, or necessarily desirable. In Ontario and elsewhere, quality is assured at fixed points in time, mainly in terms of learning inputs, outputs, and, like accreditation, fixed curricula. The Scottish QEA (and the English QEA, which is much like it) attends to the process of learning, and perceives enhancement as an infinite rate of change without absolute values.
They are also different in another way. Quality enhancement regimes almost always function at the institutional level. Quality assurance almost always functions at the program level.
Without judging one to be better than the other, the fact remains that enhancing quality and assuring quality operate from two fundamentally different mindsets. Or, with apologies for the metaphor, there is a difference between how a person learns to drive and whether or not he or she can pass the driving test.
Rhetorical question: assuming that prospective students and employers are principal audiences for either a report on quality assurance or a report on quality enhancement, which would of greater value and utility in real time?
I am somewhat late to comment on this post (about 2 years too late!). Regarding Daniel Lang’s comment, the assertion that QE and QA represent two fundamentally different mindsets, is a well-known point of dispute and debate. [See Williams, J. (2016). Quality assurance and quality enhancement: Is there a relationship?]. Having worked as a Learning Enhancement Coordinator, under the Scottish Quality Enhancement Framework (SQEF). I would state that the whole point of the Scottish system is its attempt to orientate QA towards QE. This IS quality assurance as quality enhancement, but that does not mean that there is not considerable emphasis on measurement and accountability through mandated data, and of course, the institutions and funding council negotiate and agree an institution’s goals. Alex is correct about the HE sector having a sense of ownership of the SQEF, and contributing to it collectively, with a strong sense of inter-institutional collaboration being fostered from the top. As a PhD student in BC I am currently comparing the BC approach to QA and QE, with that in Scotland. It’s a very different context. There are multiple factors creating the differences, not the least being the difference between managerial and collegial systems, and the role of the faculty associations in Canada. The question always is, who is actually making the decisions around QE?