Conclusions and Further Challenges

The intention with the current book has been to study the regulation, translation, and transformation of quality assurance from a number of perspectives and by different approaches. By doing so we have underlined the multifaceted nature of quality assurance and the many interests associated with the concept.

Three common elements have, nevertheless, emerged from the different perspectives and approaches utilised to study and analyse quality assurance in higher education:

• judged by its effects and impacts, quality assurance is not yet optimal – better processes and/or mechanisms can lead to improvements;

• defining ‘quality’ remains a problem, although it did not stop this volume’s contributors from analysing it;

• a plurality of critical analyses is required – there is no advocacy of certain quality assurance models or policies, there is a balanced analysis of different methods used for assuring quality, there is no forced consensus around certain approaches or perspectives but fortuitously much complementarity, and finally there is not the idea that ‘one size fits all’.

This final chapter intends to further develop these common elements, by calling the reader’s attention to some of the most interesting ideas expressed by the authors during the 2005 Douro Seminar and that underlie all chapters in this volume. It is also our intention to go through unresolved issues and challenging questions that constitute interesting issues surrounding quality and quality assurance in higher education. We will start by reviewing the contributions to the book.