a) Internal quality assurance
Many implement quality assurance in their institutions just because it is required by the law and regulations, i.e. accreditation and certification. However quality assurance should basically be an internally driven initiative, instead of merely to meet external requirements. It is deemed important to disseminate to all relevant parties within the institution, i.e. Rector, Dean, teachers, students, parents, and Trustees, that the primary beneficiary of quality improvement is the institution itself.
Only by understanding this concept the continuous quality improvement can be sustained and becomes an important culture in the organization.
In order to impose a continuous process of internal review and evaluation, the DGHE requires that all institutions should establish a quality assurance (QA) unit. A training program was conducted for teaching staff who are assigned to conduct the process. In 2008 all institutions were requested to submit a document describing its internal QA operation, and a review team was assigned to assess the documents and conduct site visit. After the DGHE imposed the requirement to establish internal QA unit, in 2008 there were 24 public and 44 private universities considered as already had a good QA mechanism. Currently almost all universities have already the unit in place, though its effectiveness needs still to be assessed.
Internal QA mechanism implemented requires that the education process at each study program in compliance with the agreed upon standards. Examples of the standards applied are teacher attendance, time lag between student grade submission and the examination, employers’
involvement in curriculum review, graduates’ tracer study, etc. A few study programs, such as management and accountancy, are still having difficulties to comply with such regulation. However, most study programs in more established universities have been successful to meet the compliance with the regulations. Even the Faculty of Medicine, which was previously considered as difficult due to obligation to the clinical works in the hospital, has successfully implemented a very discipline and demanding competency based curriculum.
b) Accreditation
In addition to internal QA, one of the parameters used for defining quality is the result of accreditation, which basically represents external QA. In 2010 only 11,185 programs have been through the accreditation process or around 63% of 18,298 study programs, either due to their inability to meet the quality standard or the limitation of the National Accreditation Agency’s (BAN PT) capacity to conduct assessment each year. In order to keep up with the ever increasing work load, BAN PT is in the process of shifting its strategy to evaluating institutions rather than study programs in the future.
The table 3.3 shows that the proportion of programs offered by public institutions is significantly better in term of accreditation result compared to private institutions. However the accreditation process only measures quality against the minimum standard that performance above that level is difficult to be rated against each other. Although the majority of programs in private institution is lower in quality and has small enrolment, some programs offered by larger private institutions are better than programs offered by the weakest public institutions. Due to time constraint, it not possible to extract from the BAN-PT’s database the results for Institution in Jawa vs outer islands.
c) Competitive grants
One approach to assess quality is using the result of various competitive grants administered by the DGHE. The objectives of each competition vary between schemes, but the selection process is more or less similar. The process is conducted by involving independent reviewers, mostly a combination of subject specialists and experts in university management. Since the evaluation and selection process includes an in-depth thorough desk review and rigorous site visit, the result might better reflect quality. Grantees were evaluated every year to assure that the good practices had been well implemented. DGHE has a long experience in carrying out internationally reputable review process since 1995, and considered as objective, transparent, rigorous, and reliable process conducted by highly experienced reviewers. These experts provided assistance and played a leading role in designing similar funding scheme for the Government of Sri Lanka in 2003-2006.
In 2009 the DGHE funded 9 public, 17 private, and 5 BHMN universities, whilst in PHKI-2009 12 public, 31 private, and 1 BHMN universities were selected. In 2010 the I-MHERE World Bank assisted project funded 79 grants, comprises 37 study programs in Jawa and 42 study programs in outer islands. Unforunately in 2009 DGHE changed its strategy of providing competitive grants and shifted more toward direct allocation funding scheme. Until 2009 there were hundreds of study programs in public as well as private universities have received such grants and adopted the good practices into their management. In addition, there are thousands more study programs that have not received any grants but have changed to the betterment of their education process through the dissemination of good practices by their peers. Nevertheless competition were mostly conducted in tiered system, that recipients from one tier cannot be compared with recipients from other tiers.
The track record of a study program in acquiring various competitive grants indicates that the institutional commitment for continuous improvement; hence could become an important indicator that reflect quality.
d) Teaching staff
Although the education process is probably the most important aspect in the provision of quality education service, the qualification of teaching staff is a deemed important aspect. Its importance is reflected by the only input based parameter used in this report. Table 3.5 presents the qualification of teaching staff in public as well as private institutions. More than 2/3 of S3 holders are from universities in Jawa, an obvious illustration of disparity in the capacity to conduct research and innovatoon between between economic corridors in the MP3EI. The condition in private institutions located in outer islands is the worst in term of S2 and S3 holders.
According to the Law 14/2006 teaching staff in undergraduate program should have at least S-2 qualification. Table shows that more than 87,500 lecturers have to be upgraded into at least S-2 within the next few years. It also indicates that a lot of work has still to be done to improve qualification of teaching staff, particularly in private institutions.
e) International recognition
International reputation is represents among others by world ranking, though an endless worldwide debate on whether institutional ranking represents the quality of education offered is still going on.
Table 3.4 presents the ranks according to the Times Higher Education Supplement or THES29 and Quacquarelli Symonds or QS.
29 THES changed its criteria that the ranks for these universities are not available anymore after 2009
DGHE continuously encourages institutions to improve their international reputation and recognition by providing grants for potential and prospective universities. New schemes have been introduced to provide incentives, among others supporting staff to publish their articles in refreed and reputable international journals and incentives for inventor of patents.
Some study programs in more established universities are preparing themselves for accreditation process by international professional agencies, such as American Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and World Federation of Medical Education (WFME). Some have successfully acquired the accreditation status, but we do not have the information yet on the number and the university’s names that has acquired the acrreditation.