In this issue, there is an extended editorial examining the nature and presuppositions of quantitative research. The ‘Deceit of numbers’ argues that numerical analysis is not always what it seems and that the data becomes disassociated from its meaning in the course of analysis.
The articles in the issue cover doctoral education, the future for online education, a review of higher education expenditure, the problem of comparability when using published rankings, the impact of accreditation on academic freedom, how to enhance the job-readiness of graduates and the implementation of e-learning methods.
W. Doh Nubia and Sylvan Blignaut examine how South African universities assure the quality of doctoral education. They consider the implications for the South African transformation agenda. In South Africa, transformation refers to a political change in society from segregated apartheid to an inclusive society in which doctoral education plays a transformative role. They found that access to doctoral education embraced transformation, for example, by interviewing candidates to clarify a student’s research ideas and to assess students’ readiness. It was, however, noted that assurance of quality perpetuates and privileges disciplinarity rather than cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary research.
Anca Greere and Fiona Crozier address the quality assurance expectations for online higher education post-COVID. They consider the post-pandemic implications for higher education institutions and explore the steps required to continue with online delivery, where desirable. How can a future quality assurance process adjust to and deal with online education? Their analysis of the Georgian higher education context suggested transferable findings. They conclude that clear direction at the national level is now essential to determine the detailed support and guidance necessary to achieve positive change.
Olof Hallonsten, reviewing Swedish university expenditures in the twenty-first century, asks where did all the money go? He uses publicly available statistics to trace how the substantial funding increase for higher education, since the turn of the millennium, has been used by the sector. The fund was intended to expand the admission of students to higher education and to strengthen Swedish public research and development, with a view to increasing the competitiveness of the Swedish knowledge-based economy. The article’s analysis suggests there are common misunderstandings and erroneous beliefs in the Swedish system (and indeed in international debates over higher education), including claims of a ‘depletion’ of the base grant for research and an uninhibited growth of the number of administrative staff.
Hanne Poelmans, Luciana Sacchetti, Sadia Vancauwenbergh and Stefano Piazza reassess the value of university rankings. Using the Times Higher Education ranking of Italian and Belgian universities, they argue that the comparability of rankings depends on how data is collected within each university. Different interpretation of data concepts means that ranking results cannot be meaningfully compared. Their study involves semantic harmonisation of the data concepts in two independent initiatives, in Italy and in Belgium. They compare the data and results before and after interuniversity harmonisation of data collection and demonstrate that, despite the data definitions provided by the ranking organisation, the concepts ‘academic staff’ and ‘students’ are interpreted differently within each university. These differences, then, affect the rankings.
Michael Romanowski and Ibrahim Karkoutib asked the question, does accreditation in the United Sates dilute academic freedom? Academic freedom is the civil right of academicians to engage in research, teaching and scholarly production free from control or restraint. They examine the academic literature to explore how standardisation, assessments and accreditation affect academic freedom in higher education. They argue that accreditation, with its concern for accountability and standardisation, has changed the culture of higher education. This results in a curriculum propelled by external performance assessments that constrain the work of professors by restricting the curriculum that can be taught and how that curriculum can be assessed. Such changes, thus, have created a system where accreditation could infringe on academic freedom. To avoid this, accreditation should involve shared governance at every step during the accreditation process.
James Thompson and Don Houston argue that graduate work readiness is an important quality issue. They address the specific issue of theory-practice gaps in paramedic education. The diversity of perspectives on the quality of graduate work-readiness suggests that this is a wicked problem that cannot be absolutely solved but that can be resolved by careful interventions to bridge gaps between stakeholder expectations. Using a case study, they show that assessment can be constructed as a continuous feature of the learning process to reinforce links between theory and practice. They report a decade of action research on theory-in-context education aimed to enhance graduate work readiness. Their work promotes design principles and actions applicable to the local resolution of such wicked problems.
The study by Sayed Mohamad Soleimani, Martin Jaeger, Alanoud Faheiman and Abdel Rahman Alaqqad determines the critical success factors for college and university students and academic staff when applying and evaluating online delivery methods in Kuwait. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the implementation of e-learning systems. The article explores perceptions of e-learning through surveys of undergraduate engineering students and academic staff. Results show that there is a correlation between the perceptions of students and academic staff, particularly regarding information quality, instructor quality, which were regarded as very important, as well as the benefits of the e-learning system, which was regarded as of low importance.