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The number and diversity of micro-credential offerings have expanded substantially in recent years, accelerated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines how higher education institutions envision the future of micro-credentials and notes current policy developments undertaken to support the successful integration of micro-credentials into higher education systems. It concludes by reflecting on the promises and challenges micro-credentials present to policy makers supporting their development.
This paper analyses a higher education policy issued in China in 2002: the Quality Assessment of Undergraduate Education Policy. The policy was designed with four main objectives: improvement, compliance, information and accountability. However, it has not completely fulfilled its objectives, especially regarding improvement and accountability, and it has had some unexpected consequences. Reflections on the quality assessment policy show that both inevitable and contingent factors have led to low efficiency. The authors identify the main reasons for this and propose ways to improve the policy based on the principles of the incremental and rational models of policy making and reform.
A diverse range of policies and practices are needed to promote quality assurance and improvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision. These policies and practices need to be comprehensive, cover both structural and process aspects of quality and rely on strong institutions and data systems. They can satisfy the need for public accountability while also providing feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of individual services and the sector as a whole in order to inform further actions for improvement. Quality assurance and improvement policies are particularly important in the ECEC sector, which is often characterised by a “market approach” with a heavy reliance on private providers.
The procedures commonly employed for quality assurance in higher education are designed as if the endeavour were a technical process, whereas it may be more useful to view it as a political process. For example, quality assurance requires making choices among competing conceptions of quality, and in so doing privileges some interests over others. Moreover, some stakeholders tend to be given a greater voice than others in the design and implementation of quality assurance. The author concludes that rather than denying the political nature of quality assurance, it would be better to accept Morley’s claim that quality assurance is “a socially constructed domain of power”, and design procedures for it in a way that is appropriate for a political process. It is suggested that employing the “responsive model” of evaluation could make quality assurance more effective in improving educational quality. In the responsive model, evaluation is deemed to be a collaborative process that starts with the claims, concerns and issues put forth by all stakeholders.
The last decades have witnessed an increased concern in higher education over accountability, quality and productivity, and a struggle to meet increasingly complex challenges. This is more so in Middle East and North African (MENA) economies that witnessed a large expansion as a result of a high social demand and massification policies adopted by governments in public institutions. These policies also allowed the private sector to expand to meet the increasing demand. As a consequence, higher education institutions were faced with serious challenges related to quality because the quantitative expansions took place at the expense of quality (UNESCO, 2010). Although 14 out of 20 MENA economies established national bodies for quality assurance and accreditation, quality issues are still challenging higher education institutions in the region. The author presents the achievements, challenges and issues in quality in higher education in the region. She also briefly presents several international organisations’ initiatives and perspectives on quality in higher education in the region, and attempts to propose a set of suggestions and recommendations to move the systems to higher standards that are compatible with international ones.
This paper covers the following 20 economies in the MENA region: Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan*, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Please note that wherever the term “the region” is used in the article, it refers to these economies.
Most European countries have introduced systematic quality assurance as part of an overall governance reform aimed at enhancing universities’ autonomy. Researchers and economic entrepreneurs tend, however, to underestimate the political dimension of accreditation and evaluation when they consider the contribution of quality assurance to the economic competitiveness of universities and/or the economic system as a whole. I intend to shed light on this aspect of quality assurance by 1) analysing how the provision of quality assurance is constrained by the institutional setting in place, and 2) studying the implications of that constraint on the constitution of a national and international market of quality assurance agencies.
I begin the analysis by commenting on the political stake in the emergence of a German market of competing quality assurance agencies, then highlight the irreducible dimension of national politics in creating a European market of quality assurance agencies.
Medical education is not exempt from the increasing societal expectations of accountability and this is evidenced by an increasing number of litigation cases by students who are dissatisfied with their assessment. The time and monetary costs of student appeals makes it imperative that medical schools adopt robust quality assured assessment processes. The success of these processes depends on the ability of faculty to determine the necessary changes required and manage the change process. Openness to change is critical; therefore, identifying the processes that facilitate staff openness constitutes an important step in better understanding how higher education institutions can ensure that staff members are willing to support and engage in change initiatives. This paper examines the contribution of the three attributes of the change model (content, process and context) in relation to staff openness to the quality assurance processes of assessment changes that were implemented at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine.
In recent years, provision of relevant up-skilling and re-skilling opportunities for adults has become a necessity due to global megatrends affecting labour markets. As a result, countries are looking to strengthen these opportunities throughout the life course. The successful deployment of these initiatives requires a coherent set of policies, with quality assurance being critically important. This paper provides an overview of quality assurance mechanisms from the perspective of the 38 OECD member countries. It proposes a framework to characterise and compare the governance, processes and outcomes of these mechanisms. The paper's contribution is to facilitate understanding of quality assurance across OECD countries, presenting a visual cross-country mapping that classifies existing mechanisms.
In this article we give a presentation of the Norwegian quality based financing (QBF) mechanism and our experiences with this financing mechanism. The article outlines the main features of the Norwegian health care system, and its financing mechanisms. We then focus in on the QBF with a description of the system and the main considerations on which the system is based. We give a short theoretical framework on how to design quality based financing systems, and show how the consequences can vary depending on the design of the system. The Norwegian system has been evaluated, and the main findings of this evaluation is discussed together with some tentative predictions about the future developments.
In this paper, we develop a likelihood approach for quantification of qualitative survey data on expectations and perceptions and we propose a new test for expectation consistency (unbiasedness). Our quantification scheme differs from existing methods primarily by using prior information (perhaps derived from economic theory or well established empirical relations) on the underlying process driving the variable of interest. To investigate the properties of our novel quantification scheme and to analyze the size and power properties of the new expectation consistency test, we perform Monte Carlo simulation studies. Overall, the simulation results are very encouraging and show that efficiency gains from including prior information can be substantial relative to existing quantification schemes. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration...
This paper presents a new methodology for the quantification of qualitative survey data. Traditional conversion methods, such as the probability approach of Carlson and Parkin (1975) or the time-varying parameters model of Seitz (1988), require very restrictive assumptions concerning the expectations formation process of survey respondents. Above all, the unbiasedness of expectations, which is a necessary condition for rationality, is imposed. Our approach avoids this assumptions. The novelty lies in the way the boundaries inside of which survey respondents expect the variable under consideration to remain unchanged are determined. Instead of deriving these boundaries from the statistical properties of the reference time-series (which necessitates the unbiasedness assumption), we directly queried them from survey respondents by a special question in the Ifo World Economic Survey. The new methodology is then applied to expectations about the future development of inflation obtained from the Ifo World Economic Survey.
Innovation is key to reducing the environmental impacts of plastics. However, literature is generally lacking in the field of environmentally relevant plastics innovation. This paper develops an innovative conceptual framework to document and map environmentally relevant plastics innovation. Using this framework, it develops plastics innovation metrics using patents and trademarks to quantify trends over time, across countries, and to establish preliminary empirical links between policies and innovation outcomes.
Plastic waste prevention and recycling innovation has increased slightly more rapidly than overall plastics innovation. In contrast, innovation in bioplastics have witnessed a significant slowdown in recent years. Another key finding of this analysis is that environmentally relevant plastics innovation is concentrated in OECD countries and China and that top inventor countries are not specialized in the same technologies. Finally, the patent analysis shows some empirical evidence that recycling regulations may have triggered innovative activity in plastic recycling.
Industrial policy is sparking renewed interest across OECD member countries and partner economies. However, amidst an increasing number of objectives for industrial policy, and despite the availability of information on countries’ strategies and plans, it remains difficult to properly measure and compare resources spent on industrial policies and identify countries’ strategic priorities. The lack of a cross-country comparable source of information on resources dedicated to industrial policy partly results from the absence of a common methodology to account for industrial policy expenditures.
This paper provides a new methodology for reporting industrial policy expenditure in a comparable way across countries.
It is the first deliverable of the “Quantifying Industrial Strategies” project, which aims at measuring industrial policy expenditures across OECD countries and will gather harmonised data on industrial policy expenditures, their composition, and their mode of delivery.
Industrial policy has resurfaced prominently in academic and policy discussions in the wake of major shocks and long-term trends. However, quantifying industrial strategies across countries remains difficult. The ‘Quantifying Industrial Strategies’ (QuIS) project measures industrial policy expenditures by gathering and harmonising publicly available data, based on a new methodology. This report summarises the composition of industrial strategies in the first nine participating countries in terms of expenditures, priorities, and policy instruments for the period 2019-21. The report finds that industrial policies are sizeable, with 1.5% of GDP in grants and tax expenditures, and with an important heterogeneity across countries in terms of strategic priorities; industrial strategies mainly rely on sectoral instruments, representing on average 29% of grants and tax expenditures; and green instruments are important and rose significantly in six out of nine countries between 2019 and 2021.
This paper presents a progress report on the Economics and Statistics Department's applied general equilibrium model -- the WALRAS model. This model has been developed with the explicit objective of quantifying the economy-wide effects of agricultural policies in OECD countries. The common specification of the model for the major OECD agricultural trading countries/regions (Australia, Canada, EEC, Japan, New Zealand and the United States) is described in detail. Results are presented for some preliminary simulations of the effects of removing the 1979-81 levels of agricultural assistance in these countries/regions. The initial results relate only to unilateral liberalisation experiments with the unlinked country/region models, with no account being taken of feedback effects through changes in world agricultural prices and trade volumes ...