Chinese higher education has been through a process of profound restructuring, decentralisation, introduction of market incentives, university mergers, internationalisation, and enlarging student enrolment in the past two decades. Along with the expansion of Chinese higher education, the issue of quality has become a concern. Developing quality assurance systems has been given priority in the agenda of most Chinese higher education institutions. The study presented in this book is conducted against the background of the prevailing quality culture, and focuses on student learning rather than the widely adopted top-down scrutiny of teaching as the main component of quality assurance schemes. A learning-focused quality assurance is proposed in this book to explore how to integrate student learning generically into the quality assurance process for the continuous improvement of higher education quality.

Dr. Yuan Li (PhD, MA, MEd, MSc) started her academic career in China. Then she moved to Europe and completed her MEd at K.U. Leuven, Belgium, MSc in Educational Research Methodology at University of Oxford, and PhD at the University of Manchester. Her research interests are learning, quality assurance, and linguistics.