Learning from Quality Audit in Higher Education Institutions: A Tool for Community Engagement Enhancement

Abstract

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are asked more and more to be community engaged. In fact, governments have become more sensitive regarding the role and the contributions of these institutions in the development of the society in general and students’ skills in specific. Community engagement (CE) has also become an important part of the quality accreditation framework in several countries. Through this, researchers tried to demonstrate a positive correlation between the publication of the quality audit reports and the generation of positive outcomes in terms of CE. The study notified a certain decrease in terms of recommendations related to the standard of CE in comparison with the other areas of quality assessment. However, it was not possible to establish a positive correlation between the publication of quality reports and the decrease of the number of recommendations. Researchers concluded that the institutional engagement in CE activities appears to be a more strategic imposed tool made under the constraints of the quality accreditation standards, rather than the self-awareness and self-engagement of the HEIs.