Assessing the teaching quality of economics programme: instructor course evaluations

According to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area1, ‘universities have to review their programs on a regular basis ensuring their compliance with international aims meeting learners’ and social needs, especially on quality assurance’. The academic knowledge and skills followed by concrete examples directly linked to the real world persist to be crucial issues to be absorbed and transmitted to students as learning tools and added value [1].

Stergiou and Airey and Darwin state that ‘the systems for the evaluation of teaching and course quality in higher education in-

ity [10]. They are often an important part of accreditation processes too. Marsh, Paulsen and Richardson suggest that ‘student ratings demonstrate acceptable psychometric properties which can provide important evidence for educational research’ [11–13].

The Law no. 9741, dated 21.05.2007 for the higher education made some new establishments with respect to administration, organization and financial aspect to improve quality of Albanian HEIs in alignment with the European Standards2. Even though further amendments to this were carried out, Law no. 9832, dated 12.11.2007 and Law no. 10 307, dated 22.07.2010, again there were concerns related to quality weaknesses in the HEIs3.

The new Law No. 80, dated 17.09.2015, “On Higher Education and Scientific Research in Higher Education Institutions of the Republic of Albania”, would enforce the establishment of the internal and external mechanisms on quality control in each institution4. Article 103/3 of this law states that each institution must spread and collect questionnaires before the final exams of each semester in order to track data regarding quality of teaching within the programs.

In 2014, the Ministry of Education and Sport of Albania and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) in the UK signed a Memorandum of Understanding and during 2016–2017, all the 35 HEIs in Albania, both public and private, entered the process of institutional accreditation5. One of the standards that the HEI has to fulfill is the “Study programmes are subject to their continuous improvement to increase quality”, and the concrete examples of this standard are as following:

• 1.    Lecturers are regularly assessed by institution structures that pursue qualitative implementation of study programmes.

• 2.    Students are involved in evaluation of lecturers and study programme implementation.

• 3.    Outcomes of examinations and competitions are published.

• 4.    Study programmes are improved by taking into account the outcomes of their evaluation by academic staff and students.

• 5. Study programmes quality is evaluated also by statistics of employment of graduates in the relevant study programme⁶.

Even though the evaluation of study programs is a requirement, systematic data collection and evaluation process is not well established in most of the Albanian universities. Hoxhaj and Hysa in 2015 stated that the main and the most difficult challenge for the HEIs in Albania is the improvement of controlling, monitoring and reviewing quality assurance in universities. Many public and private universities are not accomplishing the standards of existence and are still operating in educative market [14].

Motivated from the requirements to measure the teaching and course quality and a lack of instructor evaluation survey analysis in the Albanian higher education system, this study provides a useful starting point for the purpose of the present investigation. This is the first study of this kind conducted for any Albanian university. Epoka University (EU) is one of the leading universities in Albania, which is often included in the list of top three universities of this country7. This is the main reason for selecting EU as a case study. Secondly, this study can serve as a good practice, and the survey can be proposed as a quality measurement tool to the other higher education institutions of this region.

More specifically, this study is conducted for the economics program of the first cycle of study. The research focuses on a general literature review regarding the usage of different surveys and the variety of dimensions they include. A special part of the literature covers some previous studies that have used similar methods of analyzing the students’ surveys. The second part is devoted to the methodology used and data collection for our survey. The next session includes the descriptive statistics, which help to measure the reliability and internal consistency by using Cronbach’s alpha, and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to investigate the correlation between dimensions of the survey. Finally, the conclusions, discussions and study limitation takes place.