Lemmens The Virtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education Bernd Wächter (ed.) Aca papers on International Cooperation in Education The V irtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education

Quality assurance issues for governments, national agencies and insti-
tutions
“Borderless education”, as mentioned earlier, crosses several boundaries.
The crossing of these boundaries gives rise to particular quality assurance
challenges. Governments, higher education agencies and institutions are
challenged by the crossing of national borders in trans-national education, the
crossing of organisational borders in consortia-based education, the crossing
of sectoral boundaries in new educational alliances between universities and
businesses and the crossing of functional boundaries made possible by deve-
lopments in ICT. Virtual education can cross all these boundaries simulta-
neously which means that a variety of quality assurance issues need to be
addressed. The challenges to quality assurance arise in part because the
definitions of quality that we routinely use and the attendant quality assurance
arrangements have been defined in the context of traditional categories, that
is, national systems of higher education, individual institutions, higher educati-
on sectors and a seamless educational process. The emerging categories
that are associated with “borderless” and virtual education suggest a need for
some redefinition of “quality” and quality assurance arrangements.
It is already clear that governments and national agencies are exercised by
issues of definition and categorisation. Different countries are, for example,
reviewing legislation on the title, rights and responsibilities of universities (eg
New Zealand) and are designing accreditation systems for private institutions
(eg South Africa)
4
. Other countries are changing their national regulations
101
4
See CVCP report op cit

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with regard to distance education. The Japanese Ministry of Education,
Science and Technology is allowing universities to grant credit for online
courses but is setting specific rules for such courses. Argentina and Chile
have put all distance education offered in their countries under the purview of
their national accrediting agencies, while India is likely to require all foreign
universities offering distance education to register with the government
5
.
Other quality assurance issues that are being tackled at national level in-
clude customs and visa regulations for trans-national students, telecommuni-
cations’ regulations and pricing controls, intellectual property rights (IPR) for
virtual courses, recognition and licensing arrangements for providers,
arrangements and regulations for the transfer of educational credit and
methods of controlling fraudulent providers.
Quality assurance issues also arise at the institutional level and involve legal,
technical and academic dimensions. For example, institutions need to estab-
lish clear conventions and memoranda of agreement between the potentially
different parties involved in creating and delivering virtual education pro-
grammes. Institutions must be clear about who the responsible agents are
for each part of the educational process and how accountability will be
achieved. They must indicate how students, as consumers of education, will
be protected and how they can gain redress in the event of technical or aca-
demic problems, particularly those that arise in other jurisdictions. Technical
issues involve the inter-operability of different ICT systems as well as levels
of technical support for staff and students. Academic and educational quality
issues include the ways in which and the terms on which curricula are
approved and reviewed, how student learning and progression is mapped,
tracked and recorded and how quality is measured across different educatio-
nal cultures.