Quality assurance in higher education: A case study from Singapore

Abstract

The quality of an education institution 9an be conceptualised in tenns of its structure and processes. The structure includes several different aspects: vision and mission; curriculum and programmes; benchmarks and assessment of outcomes; research and publication; community and professional services; human resource management, capacity growth, and networking; management and utilisation of physical resources. Each of these aspects may be targeted at different organisational levels: individual, departmental, institutional, and beyond institutional. This aspect-by-level structure is often used to define key performance indicfl_tors (KPI) as goals that will help to monitor the status quo of the quality of the institution at a given point of time. The processes used to achieve the KPI need to move beyond structure to address the dynamic and complex interactions of people, resources, and strategies. Different perspectives have been proposed to understand how these processes might work. In this presentation, I will describe some activities that have taken place at the National Institute of Education, Singapore to address the structure and processes issues in response to local and global challenges. An important insight is that the quality of an education institution is more than the sum of the quality of its constituent parts.