Fabrizio Trifiro
Head of Quality Benchmark Services, Ecctis/UK ENIC

Over the past 20 years the international education community has seen significant growth in transnational education (TNE), that is education delivered in a country other than the country in which the awarding institution is based. This growth has occurred across the board, involving the number of providers, number of students studying, number of countries involved either as sending or receiving country, as well as the variety of types of TNE operations.

The increasingly strategic importance of TNE is also reflected in the fact that its growth now appears as an explicit target in the internationalisation strategies of education providers and ministries of education in both sending and receiving countries. And we can expect TNE to continue to grow in strategic importance post-COVID-19, as providers are appreciating the role that TNE operations and international partnerships can play in meeting the education and training needs of students unable or unwilling to travel internationally or long distances.

However, despite its growth and its increasing strategic importance worldwide, there are still important challenges and hurdles to the recognition of TNE as an acceptable mode of earning a qualification, which prevent TNE from fully realising its progressive potential as a more flexible, inclusive and sustainable form of internationalisation. These challenges relate to a lack of trust towards qualifications obtained through TNE operations whose nature and quality might be difficult to understand and assess for international regulators and credential evaluators, especially in the absence of an international framework for the quality assurance and recognition of TNE qualifications.

A number of international initiatives and guidelines have over the years emerged to inform cooperation and the development of a shared understanding in this area, such as the regional qualifications recognition conventions, and the recently signed UNESCO Global Recognition Convention. However, the implementation of these initiatives and guidelines varies greatly depending on national interpretations and broader national regulatory frameworks and policy directives.
This paper outlines a new international initiative aimed at offering that missing global solution capable of transcending and bridging the different existing national approaches for the quality assurance and recognition of TNE qualifications. This is the TNE Quality Benchmark (TNE QB) scheme developed by Ecctis - the agency that has managed on behalf of the UK government the qualifications recognition service (UK ENIC, formerly UK NARIC) since 1997 - with a view to helping improving the recognition climate for TNE qualifications of demonstrated quality and standards.

The paper introduces this initiative and explains how it can help overcoming the global quality assurance and recognition challenge for TNE by building on four international dimensions: international scope (applying to any TNE provision, regardless of country of origin or delivery); international standards (drawing on existing international reference points, such as those outlined above); international peer-review (relying on peer-assessment from both sending and receiving countries, as well as on the oversight of an international independent advisory board); and international cooperation (cutting across the quality assurance qualification recognition communities from both sending and receiving countries).

Author Profile(s)
Dr. Fabrizio Trifiro’ is an international expert in the regulation, quality assurance and recognition of TNE. He heads Ecctis’ (formerly UK NARIC) quality benchmark services aimed at supporting the recognition of international qualifications and leads strategic engagement with key international and national stakeholders.

Prior to joining NARIC, Fabrizio was with the UK QAA for over 10 years where he led on the quality assurance of UK TNE, international strategic engagement, and the international student experience

Carmen Chik
Superintendent, Learning Services, School of Specialised Learning, Hong Kong Police College

The Hong Kong Police College (HKPC) is committed to providing quality assured training by an interactive quality assurance (QA) regime upon its attainment of Programme Area Accreditation (PAA) status awarded by the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications during the unprecedented pandemic. This paper illustrates the HKPC’s QA methodologies and how Outcome-Based Teaching and Learning (OBTL) is pursued. Through presenting the hybrid teaching modes in OBTL adopted by HKPC during the COVID-19, this paper shows how the PAA status serves as a preemptive opportunity for HKPC to be highly responsive to the ever-changing internal and external environments and policing landscape both locally and regionally during and after the pandemic. This paper discusses a way out to bridge trainees’ outcome and community needs by an innovative education and teaching quality assurance measure of HKPC in the post-pandemic era in ‘Serving Hong Kong with Honour, Duty and Loyalty’.

Author Profile(s)
Carmen Chik has been a police officer of the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) for over twenty years. She mainly worked in crime stream before her promotion to Chief Inspector. She then worked in various postings of the uniformed branch including administration and operations in divisional, district and regional levels. Currently, she is the Superintendent, Learning Services Division of the School of Specialised Learning, Hong Kong Police College, mainly facilitating training units in HKPF on quality assurance and accreditation in pursuing Hong Kong Qualifications Framework of the Education Bureau of the Government. Her research interest is professional training and policing.

Faiz M.M.T. Marikar
Director, Staff Development Centre, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University       

The year was begun with the pandemic outbreak and same situation was triggered to the Sri Lanka as well with frequent lockdowns. Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education is a mandatory programme for all Sri Lankan academics who wants to be a permanent staff member at Higher Education Institutes. General Sir John Kotelawala University is a state university, and we also train young academics for this purpose. In 2021 taken a small group which was consist with 34 early young academics. Lectures were done in a blended way and after May 2021 its purely via online platform. At the end of the final session to assess according to Millers pyramid they must submit a Portfolio for evaluation. Previously we have collected the hard copies for evaluation. It is indeed a tedious job to review and reflect their capabilities and give suggestion. This year after completion we used Studio Feedback Studio and asked everyone to submit a softcopy for evaluation. Until the deadline they can do the review and asked them to bring down the similarity level below 20%. Evaluation criteria is based on an assessment rubric which consist of rationale, technical understanding, writing and presentation, reflection, assignments, and similarity index. The outcome of the online assessment tool is very efficient, within given time we were able to finish the marking and given very good feedback on it. Observation is less than 3% didn’t adhere but 97% was successfully given their portfolios. Under new normal condition for portfolio assessment, we recommended the Turnitin Studio Feedback for General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, and it is indeed a good tool.

Author Profile(s)
Dr Faiz Marikar is currently working as the Director, Staff Development Centre at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Ratmalana, Sri Lanka. He is professional academic and molecular biologist.

Fahad Anwar¹, Usama Rashed², Syed M.T.Z. Jaffery^3
1 Assistant Professor, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad
² Assistant Director Quality Assurance, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad
³ Deputy Director Quality Assurance, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad

Background: Outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has affected the whole world. The education sector is among many which has suffered the most due to this pandemic. Most institutes had to shut down during this challenging period and replace the usual face-to-face learning experience with online classes and distance learning model. Moving instruction mode online can enable the flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere, anytime, but there are certain challenges associated with such a drastic shift to distance learning education model and in order to ensure effectiveness of such a model, a comprehensive and well elaborated Quality Assurance Mechanism is the need of time.

Aims and Objectives: The aim of the study was to identify the challenges faced by students due to this shift towards distance learning education and rank the effectiveness and satisfaction of distance learning compared to classroom conventional teaching among the students from different faculties at National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. It also suggests a mechanism for Quality Assurance of Distance Learning model along with remedial measures based on students’ feedback.

Materials and Methods: The data was collected with the help of a survey, which was distributed among the Bachelors and Masters students from all departments of NUST including Natural sciences, Social sciences, Humanities and Engineering. Total of 8885 students participated in this study (63% of all university students). A set of self-designed questionnaire based on 10-points was given to the students to rank the effectiveness of learning through distance learning mode and their understanding with the satisfaction level on various aspects. Responses were analysed using SPSS software.
Results: The study result shows that majority of the students faced challenges during online classes as only 25% students were satisfied with the distance learning mode. More than 50% of the students were of the opinion that some steps had to be taken in order to increase the effectiveness of the distance learning mode. 

Author Profile(s)
Fahad Anwar, PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from University of Brescia, Italy. I was part of the research team which works on Sustainable mobility, effect of road transportation on the environment, Transportation and traffic management, Sustainable mobility infrastructure, Mobility management and Road safety issues mostly in Urban areas.

David W. Sansom
Deputy-Director, MPI-Bell Centre of English, Macao Polytechnic Institute

Teachers can be categorised as novice, experienced and expert, based on years of experience and on professional skills, knowledge and success in achieving student learning outcomes. Professional development for in-service teachers typically aims to impart knowledge and skills to novice, less experienced teachers who are considered to have a deficit of both; for more experienced teachers, continuous development implies developmental activities that push each teacher to become more effective teachers; expert teachers can always learn and do more, but are more likely to be a source of professional development rather than the object.

Since early 2020 and the sudden massive roll-out of online teaching and learning, the orderly progression from novice to experienced to, perhaps, expert teacher has been disrupted. Teachers with 20 or 30 years expertise in classroom teaching have been sat in front of computers on Zoom despite having no prior experience and no training in the skills of online teaching and learning. In effect, expert teachers have become novice teachers in online teaching contexts. These 'expert novices' need professional development; however, the deficit training approach effective for more typical novice teachers is unlikely to be successful with real experts. But a developmental or self-directed approach, more appropriate to experts, may not provide the essential online skills and knowledge these teachers need to quickly develop.

Without supportive professional development, teachers who are expert in classrooms may become disillusioned and disaffected teaching online. If they cannot make use of the expertise they have in this new context then they are unlikely to achieve the student learning outcomes needed and expected by students. There is, therefore, a need for an alternative approach to teacher professional development under the trend of online education which can bridge this gap.

Author Profile(s)
David Sansom has been working at the Macao Polytechnic Institute for over 12 years, and is currently the Deputy-Director of the MPI-Bell Centre of English. Since February 2020 he has been working with teachers as they faced a sudden shift to online teaching, and in particular the challenges faced by expert teachers who find themselves 'novice' online. He is interested in teacher change, and in the reasons why teachers may not change what they do, and in the teaching and learning of English writing.