Rationales And Approaches To Teaching Quality Assurance In The UK University

The question of how to assure the quality of higher education has been of a common concern for all countries in the era of mass higher education.As China's educational policy focuses on upgrading higher education,resulting in a major transformation of higher education up across the country,the number of undergraduate and graduate students has been growing at approximately 30%per year since 1999,and the number of graduates at all levels of higher education has approximately quadrupled in the last six years.This transformation has involved major new resource commitments to tertiary education and significant changes in organisational form,reflecting China's commitment to continued high growth through quality upgrading.In accordance with this change,colleges and universities in China are in the midst of looking for ideas and practices that have been proved to be successful to help with the quality assurance,and contextualizing them into their own system by experimenting an organizational transformation from an"elite education" to "mass education".This is attempted by introducing a market oriented mechanism for admission and graduation called "loose admission and strict graduation"meaning" easy-in and tough-out" to replace its original but out of dated centralized mechanism called "strict admission and loose graduation" meaning tough-in and easy-out" The "loose admission and strict graduation" is claimed to be the best way to continue China's improved accessibility for universities and upgrade at the same time the educational efficiency,to balance off the gap between equality of education and quality of education with attempt to the world-class universities.To this end,the thesis looks at the UK university quality assurance system as an immediate learning example,in which its historical evolution,current framework,and its long practicing mechanism are believed be of great reference to China.The study is literature based,reviewing official documents,scholarly articles and books published in both Chinese and English,and also referring to the practice across three colleges within the framework of University of London,namely London School of Economics and Political Science(LSE),King's College London(KCL)and University College London(UCL).It is hoped the thesis will deepen our understanding of the issues that related to university teaching excellence and university quality assurance at the policy level,and put forward some suggestions for national policy makers,university administrators,teachers and students to allow some immediate changes or a fundamental reform to take place in China,so as to pave the way for China's mass high education to grow healthier in a long run.