Creating Cultures of Quality Within Asia Pacific Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Defining quality within higher education settings has long been recognized as a difficult endeavor, a process that has gained even another level of complexity as higher education institutions (HEIs) have moved into the process of massification. National and international accreditation bodies have been highly active in developing ever-improving concepts of quality and methods for their assessment within complex institutional forms, and throughout the world, despite the high levels of difference in some cases, one can perceive a general movement toward some common themes or principles in quality discourse. This volume seeks to provide both a framework for viewing such quality endeavors and a set of cases that suggest how the difficult transition is made from defining and seeking to assess quality at a general level to making such determinations at an institutional level.