Assurance of university educational quality in Ibero-America: trends, absences and challenges

The quality assurance of higher education globally is a vital process to achieve a culture of continuous improvement, for the benefit of society. It seeks to provide a systematic view of the trends and absences in the process of quality assurance of university education in Ibero-America, using quality dimensions, according to scientific articles in journals indexed in two databases: Scopus and Scielo; between 2012 and July 2021. The following are considered as criteria: the year and country of publication, the trends and gaps in each quality dimension, and the proposed challenges. Of the 85 articles, the largest quantity corresponds to Spain and Chile; The predominant trend is to investigate the quality dimension of the internal and external assurance framework, and the main absence is articles on the quality dimension in facilities, academic resources, and support; with only 1% (n = 1). The challenges in quality assurance are varied for each dimension, some being online or virtual education, which emerged in 2013 but is again important due to the COVID 19 pandemic, as well as achieving a culture of quality and identity, homogenization versus innovation, among others.