The aim of this paper is to develop a model that addresses and bridges the gap between quality management and student experience. The model incorporates the most commonly occurring systems, namely: quality control; quality assurance; quality audit; quality assessment; quality enhancement; and quality management. The paper highlights the key…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are complex entities interacting with a variety of stakeholders. Scholars have widely discussed the approaches and models of value co-creation in the higher education context. However, the attention has been primarily focussed on a single category of stakeholders, namely students. The article aims at eliciting…

Increasingly, universities prioritise employability as a primary purpose of personal and public investment into higher education and target graduate employability in their teaching, learning, assessment, and student support strategies. However, despite its emergence as a central concern in higher education, graduate employability lacks coherent…

This article develops the concept-mapping method as a tool for enhancing teaching quality in higher education. In particular, it describes how concept mapping can be used to transform abstract knowledge and understanding into concrete visual representations that are amenable to comparison and measurement. The article describes four important uses…

Developing leadership in students is part of the remit of higher education institutions. In recent decades, student leadership development programs have proliferated at universities worldwide. However, the contested understanding of the term 'leadership' has resulted in lack of clarity regarding how this may be 'developed' in higher education.…

Describes development and use of the Course Experience Questionnaire to measure perceived teaching quality in higher education, and construction of a new generic teaching skills scale. Evaluation with large multidisciplinary samples in Australia confirmed reliability and validity of both short and long forms. Criterion and discriminant validity…

This article describes the Course Experience Questionnaire, a student evaluation of teaching performance. The article discusses the instrument's theoretical basis, statistical qualities, and national trials in Australian higher education. The questionnaire is seen to offer a reliable, verifiable, and useful means of evaluating teaching quality in…

Systems thinking is challenging but clearly important in higher education to understand relationships between different elements influencing the quality and student learning and achievement. A similar challenge is found in healthcare, where patient safety activities are more and more seen and dealt with in a broader system perspective. A…

In this contribution to the Special Issue of Studies in Higher Education, I describe developments during the COVID-19 pandemic in Dutch higher education along three lines. First, the context is outlined in chronological order. It concerns the evolution of the pandemic in the Netherlands, complemented by the general situation at my own university…

Efforts to recruit international students to higher education must be matched with preparation of the campus community for engaging with this diverse population. The motives of international students for pursuing international studies, including academic and career goals, are facilitated through building strong relationships with members of the…

The representation of scientific knowledge and information on Wikipedia is controversial. While some entries present established scientific fact, other entries are devoid of information or present information of questionable rigour. Taking this and the problems associated with essay topics as assessment tasks into consideration, an assessment task…

A historically informed analysis of the academic board or senate in Australian universities, and in the wider higher education environment, particularly the UK, indicates that the role and function of academic boards has fundamentally changed in the past 30 years. Within the context of universities being repositioned to serve global knowledge…

If a curriculum in higher education is understood to be an educational vehicle to promote a student's development, and if a curriculum in higher education is also understood to be built in large part around a project of knowledge, then the issue arises as to the links between knowledge and student being and becoming. A distinction is made here…

Over the past 20 years, universities in the United Kingdom have been undergoing a dramatic period of transformation and change which can be attributed to the expansion of the higher education sector, the growth in student numbers and the development of an ideological approach to public service management referred to as "new…

Higher education as a field of study emerged as universities became complex institutions requiring data and interpretation for effective management and governance. The field expanded in the mid-20th century, and now includes many research and other journals, books, and other reports and publications. Academic departments and centers have been…