Quality Teaching and Learning in Australian and South African Universities: Comparing policies and practices

Over the last decade universities across the world have been grappling with quality and quality assurance issues. In several countries national policies on higher education quality assurance have been evolving, mostly with the purpose of putting external systems of quality assurance in place. In many instances, these policies and systems had less effect on the quality of teaching and learning than had been expected. This paper serves as a comparison of national quality policy developments in two countries, Australia and South Africa, and goes on to investigate the emerging tensions in quality policy processes in these countries. Whereas a number of similarities were discerned, differences were as evident, verifying the underlying assumption of the authors that notions of quality, and quality policies and their implementation are very much dependent on the particular localised contexts in which they exist.     

Brand image legacies of the 2010 FIFA World CupTM: a long-term assessment

Abstract

There has been limited research on brand legacies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup^TM; hence, this research examined brand image legacies of this tournament in the long run in South Africa in relation to determining the changes in international football tourists’ perceptions of South Africa as result of hosting this event. A quantitative methodology was employed to survey 391 international football tourists at fan parks and stadium precincts in five metropolitan cities in France during the 2016 UEFA European Championship, using a spatially based systematic sampling technique. The findings reveal statistically significant differences in most aspects between football tourists’ perceptions prior to, and six years after, the tournament. International football tourists’ perceptions changed positively six years after the event, including those features that were highlighted as major concerns prior to the tournament. The key findings of this study have a wider applicability to sport mega-events legacy research and body of knowledge.     

Formulation of a DIMTEST Effect Size Measure (DESM) and Evaluation of the DESM Estimator Bias

DIMTEST is a widely used and studied method for testing the hypothesis of test unidimensionality as represented by local item independence. However, DIMTEST does not report the amount of multidimensionality that exists in data when rejecting its null. To provide more information regarding the degree to which data depart from unidimensionality, a DIMTEST-based Effect Size Measure (DESM) was formulated. In addition to detailing the development of the DESM estimate, the current study describes the theoretical formulation of a DESM parameter. To evaluate the efficacy of the DESM estimator according to test length, sample size, and correlations between dimensions, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted. The results of the simulation study indicated that the DESM estimator converged to its parameter as test length increased, and, as desired, its expected value did not increase with sample size (unlike the DIMTEST statistic in the case of multidimensionality). Also as desired, the standard error of DESM decreased as sample size increased.