The higher education sector is experiencing significant changes with the emphasis on learning outcomes, greater mobility of students, and proliferation of new delivery modes. For higher education institutions, these changes have brought greater challenges in assessing attainment of institutional outcomes. From the perspective of higher education regulators and quality assurance agencies, these changes have brought greater challenges in diverting their limited resources to issues that warrant more attention. Considering these challenges, this paper discusses the opportunities and barriers if using quality indicators in higher education. The discussion transcends from a summary of typical institutional data, development of learning analytics, to the sensitivity of using institutional data in external quality assurance.

Alan Wu
Dr. Alan Wu has more than 20 years of working experience in different educational contexts, with intimate knowledge and practical experience of different education and training provision, obtained in Hong Kong and from overseas. He served as Director of Risk at the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) in Australia, and currently as a Senior Registrar of HKCAAVQ, heading the Research and Training unit. His research interests include quality assurance and accreditation, knowledge management and data analytics.