Bruce Ingraham
University of Teesside, UK

Shirley Ingraham
University of Teesside, UK

eQuality
A dialogue between quality and academia

This presentation will do two things. First, it will explore the changing power relationships within the quality management practices of UK higher education with specific reference to online learning. Second, it will explore this increasingly agonistic relationship between academics and administrators through a dialogic presentation that itself questions the power relationships that constrain the conduct of scholarly discourse in increasingly technologically mediated environments.

With respect to the explicit subject matter, Quality Assessment can usefully be understood as a series of "How do you know that …?" questions. E.g. "How do you know that your teaching strategies actually lead to the learning outcomes that you desire?" or "How do you know that the learning resources you distribute effectively contribute to the desired learning outcomes?". Traditionally in the UK such questions were largely addressed in a collegial manner by academic subject specialists networked through external examiners. During the last 30 years, however, this system has become increasing bureaucratised and increasingly hierarchised both within and across institutions with academics increasingly being required to address demands articulated by extra-academic staff or organisations. In short, there has been a movement from a system that at its best was carnivalesque in the sense articulated by Bakhtin (1984) to one that shows all the hallmarks of a more Foucauldian (1975) power structure articulated through the surveillance of organisations like the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).

These issues clearly extend beyond the limits of online learning, but online learning provides a useful locus in which to examine these relationships because it still further problematises them. This problematisation can interestingly be seen in the way the QAA's forthcoming Code of Practice for what it calls Flexible and Distance Learning (FDL) slightly fudges the issue of offering guidance with respect to the quality of learning resources included in FDL. The Code simply says that the resources should meet the institution's internal quality standards. However, as the dialogue will reveal through the examination of a real (but anonymised) university's practice it is by no means clear how institutions actually insure the quality of learning resources irrespective of the means of dissemination.

These, and related issues, will be explored through a dialogic interaction between representatives of quality management and academia. By representing the key issues in a formalised dialogue the presentation will 'dramatise' the complexity of the tensions existing in this re-articulation of power within educational praxis in a way that a more conventional representation could perhaps not (Scollon, 1998). For example, it will be made apparent that this dialogue between academics and quality managers may be 'fatally flawed' with respect to online learning if it fails to include the expert learning technologist.

In any case, the dialogic representation (which ideally will be video mediated ) will offer a test case through which the audience can consider some of the issues surrounding the potential explored at the last ICE Symposium (Ingraham, forthcoming) to represent academic discourse through media other than conventional printed articles and, by so doing, open for discussion the potential conflict between the hierarchical power structure of academic publishing and the carnival of the academic internet.

References

Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and his World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.

Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison,
Gallimard, Paris.

Ingraham, B. (2005), 'Ambulating with mega-fauna', In Education in cyberspace, ed. S. Bayne and R. Land., RoutledgeFalmer, London.

The Quality Assurance Agency (2004), 'Draft Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education, Section 2: collaborative provision, flexible and distance learning (including eLearning)', http://www.qaa.ac.uk/public/cop/cprovis/draft/contents.htm.

Scollon, R. (1998), Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction, Longman, London.