Higher education learning and teaching has faced a significant challenge in 2020. The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has required institutions to engage in emergency response teaching and deliver distance, online, or socially distanced delivery in most jurisdictions globally. The literature to date has focused on understanding this from the…

This paper explores what underlies the recent introduction of a Higher Education Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in England. Related changes to the higher education landscape are discussed: the 2017 Higher Education Act and creation of a new HE regulator, the Office for Students. How TEF works and some of the consequences of TEF are outlined.…

In education policy, conservatives have often been more identifiable by what they are against than what they are for. Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 promising to eliminate the Department of Education, and since then, numerous conservative politicians have stated they wish to do the same. At times, conservatives have been known to support school choice…

One of the key goals within the global higher education sector is to continue to improve current practice in learning and teaching. Associated with this push is accountability or compliance, in terms of institutional leaders and teaching staff being able to evidence the ways in which student learning outcomes are achieved. A current area of focus…

This study illustrates a method for evaluating the accuracy of performance metrics and identifies potential institutional and student attributes that may increase the likelihood of classification errors. Longitudinal data were obtained from the Integrated Postsecondary Eduation Data System for public 4-year institutions (N = 558) to evaluate…

This paper applies political discourse analysis to an examination of gubernatorial rhetoric and agenda setting around higher education in Texas during Governor Rick Perry's leadership, from 2000-2015. The authors analyzed 28 gubernatorial speeches using manifest content analysis in STATA and qualitative coding via pattern matching in Atlas.ti.…

In April 2017, a three-day Learning Improvement Summit, held in Washington, DC, brought together a broad array of national and international assessment stakeholders. The purpose of the summit was to empower a diverse group of faculty and assessment leaders to develop, refine, discuss, and address evidence-based learning improvement initiatives…

With the cost of college soaring and the national six-year completion rate below 60 percent, the federal government's support for higher education is facing heightened scrutiny. What kind of regulation and accountability should Congress impose on what might be termed the world's largest voucher program--Washington's hefty funding of Pell grants…

This paper shows how Karen Barad's "agential realism" provides a powerful analytical framework for assessing higher education accountability. It takes the example of the UK 'National Student Survey' (NSS), a questionnaire, which purports to ascertain student course satisfaction in universities. The paper demonstrates how agential realism…

The federal government currently provides more than $150 billion each year to students and their families in the form of grants, loans, work-study funds, and tax credits to help make college more affordable. This sizable public investment in higher education has indeed made college attendance possible for a larger share of Americans. However,…

COVID-19 has led to unprecedented disruption and many providers have swiftly adapted their normal business operations in response to the challenges and changed environment. The focus of government and the sector has now shifted to the COVID-19 recovery period. The guidance in this report sets out key, high-level, principles-based considerations…

Through the reinforcement of shared assessment biographies, the provision of performance grades has been socially constructed as an operating imperative within the assessment practices of universities. The drive towards enhanced accountability through the production of quantifiable outcomes has also played a naturalising role in this practice. In…

The purpose of this paper is to explore internal management, advocacy and partnerships of interest groups with the aim of representing their interests in public policy formation with a view to developing a stakeholder typology. This qualitative study involves eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with representatives from stakeholder…

This paper describes a good governance architecture framework that would bring significant improvements in the overall working of open and distance learning institutions in a well-structured and systematic way. The good governance framework is articulated with seven basic principles which are performance, transparency, accountability,…

Higher education (HE) scholarship often focuses on the so-called 'entrepreneurial' university as a consequence of new public management reforms. Simultaneously, the remarkable expansion of private HE is said to fragment, specialize, and diversify HE systems. Such diagnoses are misleading as they ignore wider environmental pressures and…