A metamodel for academic programme management quality assurance in higher education
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Date
2019
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Abstract
Academic programme management quality assurance (APMQA) is a management approach to evaluate the quality of performance in the higher education system. Quality assurance documents must be prepared to represent the APMQA system in higher learning institutions (HLIs). There is a gap of understanding document preparation, which later leads to difficulty of sharing best practices and knowledge across borders. Besides, lack of standardised definition describing the details of APMQA model could lead to inconsistency when interpreting the quality assurance guidelines. This study developed a new approach of managing the scattered and complex domain structure by proposing new generic concepts of APMQA system embedded with properties of the current APMQA system. Three research objectives guided this study; (1) to identify the various requirements of academic programme management quality assurance in higher learning institutions, (2) to structurally organise academic programme management quality assurance domain knowledge by using metamodelling technique, and (3) to develop and validate metamodel that encapsulates academic programme management quality assurance domain knowledge in higher learning institutions. A design science research paradigm was used as the lens to solve the problems. The metamodelling approach was employed to produce APMQA metamodel. In this study, 26 models were analysed using 7 steps of the metamodelling approach divided into three phases, namely metamodel development, validation and conformance. Phase 1 was a five-step process to develop the initial metamodel. Next, phase 2 validated the initial metamodel using expert validation technique. Finally, phase 3 demonstrated the metamodel through metamodel conformance using a case study. Then, the validated APMQA metamodel was categorised into five areas that cover the academic programme management comprising curriculum design, curriculum delivery, student assessment, programme improvement and quality improvement. Each of the area consists of concepts, relationships, attributes and operations of the domain and represented by UML class diagram. Findings from the case study showed that the APMQA metamodel organises the concepts, definitions, relationships and attributes of the domain. Besides, it facilitates clearer creation and presentation of the domain properties to hasten system development, and indirectly, reduces the cost of system development time. Another application of the metamodel is that new users would have a better understanding of the domains as the metamodel acts as a domain dictionary, which encapsulates various and evolving processes in the APMQA.
Description
Thesis (PhD. (Information Systems))
Keywords
Education, Higher—Management, Education, Higher—Quality control