A Study On Higher Education Quality Assurance In Canada

This report whose main content is about quality assessment mechanisms currently in place in Canadian higher education seeks a knowledge of current systems and approaches to quality assurance in Canada, including AUCC membership, internal program review managed by institutions and newly established provincial quality assessment boards.Canada lacks a consistent and comprehensive approach to quality assurance.In Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick, the degree-granting market has opened to new institutional suppliers. These provinces have also established mechanisms to ensure the quality of the new providers’programming. However,New providers are generally not able to become members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). But many public universities only recognize degrees from institutions belonging to AUCC,which causes new providers to be deemed as non-accredited and some graduates of new providers’degree programs to face the repercussions of these credential recognition issues, despite having successfully undergone published both academic standards and rigorous external review procedures.This project sets out to discover models of institutional accreditation that may provide for inter-provincial recognition of credentials.The following report consists of six main sections. Introduction provides background information substantiating the report’s approach,assumptions, concepts, and methods undertaken in producing this report.The first chapter includes a brief review of Canadian higher education, the traditional degree-granting paradigm in Canada and institutional and degree typologies emerging to challenge this paradigm. The second chapter outlines the agencies that have been established in legislation by provincial governments.The third chapter reports higher education institution consortium agencies that have been established by the higher education institutions themselves to address issues related to quality.The fourth chapter describes professional and occupational organizations that approve or accredit programs that prepare individuals for practice in the relevant profession; and theological accreditation agencies that accredit schools and programs that prepare individuals for religious vocations. The descriptions of the agencies in each chapter will follow the format:a general profile of the agency; the evaluation method; its evaluation standards; and assessors and how they are recruited. Finally, the report concludes with a synopsis of the study and reflections on the challenge of inserting new degrees and new kinds of degree-granting institutions into a framework of academic legitimacy that all players will accept by providing in depth examination of the study’s findings, with a view to recommending as to whether Canadian jurisdictions should consider a new quality assurance regime...