A Consideration of quality, standards and compliance

Abstract

With the advent of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) there is an increased focus, at all levels in the university community, on the quality of teaching, learning and research. Quality itself is not well defined within the framework of TEQSA, the definition is however approximated by a set of minimum standards. This is problematical as there is scant evidence that threshold standards produce a high quality education. Often the good quality, and high standards, that are achieved within the university are due to the good quality, and high personal standards, of the staff. The appraisal of quality is therefore left to a number of stakeholders, within the University community, and with external course accreditation bodies. This means that individual unit coordinators, and members of the University community, have to amass a large collection of disparate material to create the body of evidence for compliance with standards, and to act as quality indicators. Managing this information can be very time consuming at the individual level. It is therefore essential that there be streamlined methods for enabling compliance and capturing and storing the evidence.