ENHANCING QUALITY EDUCATION IN UNIVERSITIES THROUGH INNOVATIVE IQA TOOLS

The rapid expansion of enrolment in universities that is unmatched with expansion of facilities and infrastructure has continued to raise concerns about the quality of higher education institutions (HEIs) and their programmes. In addition, the rising graduate unemployment has attracted the resurgent debate on the quality of graduates churned out by universities. These concerns have prompted the development of external quality assurance (EQA) mechanisms in higher education across the globe where governments are involved in the quality control of the institutions’ programmes through periodic external assessments which include accreditation, quality audit, and evaluation. Notably, quality assurance (QA) was initially externally driven. However, it has recently become a requirement for HEIs to set up internal quality assurance (IQA) systems for monitoring and managing quality. In this paper, IQA is viewed as a system of a set of integrated policies and practices at HEIs which manage, implement, and adapt quality assurance processes, instruments, and measures to fulfil external standards and criteria as well as internal standards and objectives. This paper reviews literature on the tools used by universities to enhance IQA with a view to making recommendations on innovative tools that could enhance best practices and standards of delivering relevant quality education at this highest level of learning