Assuring the Quality of Engineering Education

Only the foolhardy would question the importance and status that quality assurance holds in the current political climate that prevails for higher education. This paper critiques the culture of higher education quality assurance and accreditation that has emerged over the last twenty years. An underlying trend that influences quality systems for higher education is the focus on process and service. This results in quality systems that focus on documenting educational processes, and which often assume that students are a type of customer, and education a type of service. This paper argues that this educational epistemology oversimplifies the nature and role of higher education. We argue that a more holistic quality evaluation model is needed, including often overlooked aspects of quality such as curriculum, pedagogical aspects of instructional design combined with industrial and educational quality assurance processes that can better meet the needs of practitioners and institutions.