About the editors and contributors

Mahsood Shah is the Principal Advisor, Academic Strategy, Planning and Quality with the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at RMIT University (the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Melbourne, Australia. In this role, Mahsood works closely with faculties and schools and provides strategic advice to the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) on all aspects of academic strategy, academic quality, reviews and enhancing institutional learning and teaching outcomes. Mahsood has 20 years of work experience in tertiary education in various roles with responsibilities related to strategy development, strategy implementation and reviews, quality assurance, leading external quality audits, review of academic and administrative units including review of academic programmes, performance monitoring in all areas of the university including the development of IT-enabled management information capability, course accreditations with professional bodies, stakeholder surveys, student experience and building institutional research capacity in universities. Prior to joining RMIT University, Mahsood led strategy development and quality assurance in three other universities. Mahsood has also worked closely with many private for-profit higher and vocational education providers in Australia in quality assurance and institutional accreditation. Apart from his full-time role at RMIT University, Mahsood is an Adjunct with the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra, Australia.

Sid Nair is currently with the Centre for Advancement of Teaching and Learning, University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth. Prior to his appointment to UWA, he was Quality Adviser (Research and Evaluation) in the Centre for Higher Education Quality at Monash University, Australia. He has extensive expertise in the area of quality development and evaluation, and he also has considerable editorial experience. Currently, he is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Quality Assurance in Engineering and Technology Education and Associate Editor of the Journal of Quality Approaches in Higher Education. Prior to this, he was also a Managing Editor of the Electronic Journal of Science Education. Professor Nair is also international consultant in a number of countries establishing quality centres, such as Oman and India. He is also involved in a project to implement effective student evaluations across Indian universities.

Timo Ala-Vähälä is a researcher at the Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published on Finnish and European quality assurance policies and on social aspects of sports. His current interests are quality assurance in higher education and comparative analyses of education.

Naziha Ahmad Azli is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor, Malaysia. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from UTM in 2002. As the 4th Year Laboratory Coordinator in her Faculty, she introduced the Problem-based Laboratory in 2007 as part of the Electrical Engineering programme curriculum. She has written many papers that are published in local and international conference proceedings and academic journals related to her field of technical research and to innovative teaching and learning methods and experiences. She has recently given a series of talks related to Outcome-based Education to all non-academic staff at UTM.

Jan Cameron succeeded John Jennings as the third Director of New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit (NZUAAU), a position that she has held since March 2010. Jan has a BSc in Zoology from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and an MSocSc and DPhil in Sociology from the University of Waikato. She was previously Assistant Vice-Chancellor (AVC) (Academic) (1998-2010), Dean of Arts (1996-98) and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Her responsibilities as AVC (Academic) spanned the range of student support, teaching and learning and included responsibility for both the Academic Quality Assurance Unit and the University Centre for Teaching and Learning. Jan has extensive experience of academic audit, programme approval and accreditation: she managed the quality assurance and audit self-review processes at Canterbury over two academic audit cycles and served for many years on the Committee for University Academic Programmes of the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee. In addition to managing audits for NZUAAU, Jan is on the New Zealand auditor register and has served on an audit panel in Oman. She is a Board member of the Asia-Pacific Quality Network.

Asha Gupta is a political economist by training, with keen interest in research related to higher education. She is currently working as a Director at the Directorate of Hindi Medium Implementation, University of Delhi, India. She is also affiliated to the Program on Research on Private Higher Education, SUNY-Albany, USA. She is the author of Socialism in Theory and Practice, Changing Perspectives of the Welfare State, Beyond Privatization, and Education in the 21st Century: Looking Beyond University. She has co-edited a book on Private Higher Education: Global Trends and India Perspectives with Professor Daniel C. Levy and Professor K.B. Powar. She has received the National Merit Scholarship, University Grants Committee Career Award in Humanities, Swedish Younger Scholar Award, Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellowship (twice) and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Fellowship (twice).

Hadina Habil is an Associate Professor attached to the Language Academy, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Malaysia. She teaches discourse analysis and business and technical communication. Her research interests are in the areas of English for Specific Purposes, Business Communication, Computer Mediated Communication and Language and Communication. She has presented and published papers in her areas of interest nationally and internationally.

John M. Jennings had a long career as a musicologist at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. While at Canterbury, John served as Head of the School of Music, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Deputy Chair and Chair of the Academic Administration Committee (the Committee of Deans), through which he developed strong interests in the pursuit of academic quality and academic excellence at an institutional level. The last eight years of his professional life were spent as Director of the New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit based in Wellington. John has published on aspects of music education history in Canterbury, New Zealand and on aspects of academic audit in New Zealand. His aim for academic audit has been to add value to universities' own programmes of quality assurance and quality enhancement by strengthening the enhancement-led approach to external academic audit, by developing a partnership relationship with universities in the administration of academic audits and by seeking assurance from universities that the recommendations that arise from academic audits are easily integrated into the universities' own quality programmes.

Sereana Kubuabola has been the Senior Quality Assurance Coordinator (SQAC) at the University of the South Pacific (USP), Suva, Fiji since 2007. She has a PhD in Environmental Chemistry from the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Sereana taught in secondary schools in Fiji before becoming the Senior Education Officer in Chemistry in the Fiji government' Ministry of Education. Prior to working as the SQAC in the USP Planning and Quality office, Sereana was a lecturer and then became the Manager Analytical Services of the University's commercial laboratory, which is accredited under ISO 17025. Sereana was instrumental in the University's preparation for external audit by the Australian Universities Quality Agency and New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit and also in the planning and monitoring of post-audit processes. Sereana was actively involved in the initial processes for the development of the Fiji National Qualification framework. She continues to engage in the development of the Pacific Qualifications Framework and Register as the USP representative.

Lis Lange is the Senior Director heading the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Before this, she was the Executive Director (2006-10) of the Higher Education Quality Committee of the Council of Higher Education, which has responsibility for the quality assurance of public and private higher education institutions in South Africa. She has been involved in the development and implementation of science and technology and higher education policy in South Africa for a decade and a half, working in different capacities in the Human Sciences Research Council, the National Research Foundation and the Council on Higher Education. Dr Lange has served as a member of the board of the International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education and has participated in several international initiatives on quality assurance. She has undertaken research and published in the fields of history, higher education and quality assurance.

Maria Jose Lemaitre is the Executive Director of the Interuniversity Center for...