Professionals' perceptions of the quality of the transnational higher education in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper discusses the professionals' perceptions of the quality of the transnational higher education in Sri Lanka. The main research questions focus on the priorities for quality in relation to the foreign degree awarding institutes of Sri Lanka and to what extent that the foreign degree awarding institutes of Sri Lanka implement and maintain quality in their institutes. Three different stakeholder groups, namely, lecturers and the senior managers of the foreign degree awarding institutes and the officials of the government organizations related to higher education were included in the sample. This study employed a vertical case study and the data were collected using a questionnaire survey. The findings revealed how quality can be understood differently by various stakeholder groups and the consequences of these various understanding to the quality of these institutes. Furthermore, the difficulties that these institutes face when implementing and maintaining quality were identified and a bank of solutions were suggested to these stakeholder groups by analyzing the data. It was evident from the results that the foreign degree awarding institutes of Sri Lanka face many issues related to quality due to lack of supervision from the government and their respective foreign providers. Since there is very limited research in this area, this paper may serve as a guide to quality of the transnational higher education of Sri Lanka.