Quality Assurance has been a well defined mechansim in all sorts of commerical industry. In manufacturing, there is normally a Quality Assurance Team which consists of Technical Staff and Experienced Management whom can detect defects or poorly manufactured goods during random sample inspections. In education field, what used to exist in our mind in quality control was that we trusted the reputation of an educational institution so we chose it to puruse our studies. Then, whom perform the quality control process for us? The management, the administrative staff or the teaching staff?
To answer this question, let's imagine the course/programme offered by an educational institution as a product marketed for sale at the open market, the customers, the government, the market owner the agents, if any, and the product producers are all responsible for completing the task because they all lies in the vertical relationship during the whole process upon the production of a product. Although to the customers, the product may only mean a moment of enjoyment or entertainment, the value added to the brand and given to the cutomers are beyond the extrinsic value one should observe from the product. Similar to education field, the course/programme does not mean what the title of course/programme suggests but the whole learning process which the customers and the programme offerers expect BEFORE the course/programme actually opens. To the government and the industries that require high quality human resources, they don't simply observe the title of course/programme as printed on the students' reports, but the learning outcomes students acheive after all. This is the basic idea of Quality Assurance in Education Field.
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