INQAAHE Conference 2023
Roadmap to Enabling Quality in Tertiary Education 2030
May 30, 2023
Sub-theme 4 Core Values and Quality of Higher Education
Interactive session
Quality Assuring, but at what cost?
We are living in a time where governments have less resources, where the economy is close to a collapse, and the educational institutions,especially public ones,are seeing their budgets strained. For the first time since the implementation of the institutional auditsin Ontario, Canada, the conversations of leaders that are committed to quality, have turned to worry. Currently, when the audit notification comes to a college’s inbox, overwhelming concern sets-inas colleges engage in finding the resources to compile the evidence and write a self-study report to demonstrate the processes that they practice and have embeddedin their system. Collegesbare their soul to an external review that includes an auditor panel site visit, organizedby the QA agenciesand yet, atthe end of theday, itremains unclear if collegesadopt a culture of quality or if colleges work to succeed an audit.
Facilitated by:
Dr. Karen Belfer
As Executive Director of the OCQAS, Karen oversees the self-regulatory mechanisms for the public colleges in Ontario and is responsible for the operation of the Credentials Validation Service and the College Quality Assurance Audit Process. Prior to joining the OCQAS, Karen spent seven years as the Dean of the Centre for Instructional Development and Applied Research at Vancouver Community College (VCC), a unit responsible for college wide instructional development, program review, curriculum development, educational technology and applied research implementation. At different points in time she was also responsible for the School of Instructor Education (five years), Centre for Business Studies (three years), and the School of Arts and Science - College Foundations and University Transfer (two years). Prior to VCC she worked as an Educational Consultant for BCIT, UBC and TechBC. As a consultant, she managed projects internationally and in various Canadian institutions. Her focus was the design, implementation and evaluation of new educational approaches and technologies to enhance the learning process. Karen did her undergraduate work in Informatics, her Masters in Adult Education, and Ph.D. in Educational Research at the Anahuac University in Mexico, where she taught for 10 years.
INQAAHE Conference 2023 is sponsored by the Education & Training Evaluation Commission (ETEC), a gold sponsor.