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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
st
21 September 2021

that is most competent to assess the perception of quality assurance (Westerheijden et al., 2007). Even
though this has been well recognized among the developed nations (Anderson, 2007), this has not been

adequately discussed in the Asian context. Therefore, this paper examines the academics’ perspective

of quality assurance in higher education in Sri Lanka and the research findings will contribute to
bridge the knowledge gap in the existing literature by introducing an effective implementation and

development of a quality assurance system within the Sri Lankan higher education system. The
specific objectives of this study were; to ascertain the perception of academic staff towards quality in

higher education, to identify the academics’ perceptions of development of quality assurance system in
higher education, to examine the impact of quality assurance on teaching and learning from the

perspective of academics and to identify factors included in quality assurance framework from

academics’ point of view.

Methodology

The present study utilized purposive sampling technique and all academics which represent the ten
faculties namely; Faculty of Agriculture (n=68), Faculty of Engineering (n= 85) Faculty of

Medicine(91), Faculty of Humanities and Social Science (139), Faculty of Management and Finance

(81), Faculty of Allied Health Science (23), Faculty of Technology (39), Faculty of Science (80),
Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Science (30), Faculty of Graduate Studies (01) of the University of

Ruhuna were selected as the respondents of the study. Furthermore, the participants included in the
sample were in different academic positions in the University. A Google form questionnaire was

prepared to collect primary data and it was sent to all academics via their university emails. The initial
questionnaire was prepared after a careful evaluation of the available literature. Accordingly, the

questionnaire was designed to assess academics' perspective on quality assurance in higher education

in Sri Lanka. It consisted of five sections which are used to assess the demographic features of the
academic staff members, their perception towards the quality in higher education and the development

of an effective and efficient quality assurance system in higher education. Further it contained different

questions to ascertain the impact of quality assurance on teaching and learning process and the
academics’ opinions to develop a quality assurance framework. The link was disabled after 14 days of

circulation and 67 responses were obtained. Secondary data were collected from Central Bank reports,
research paper articles, newspaper articles, journals, and other websites etc. IBM SPSS version 25

software was mainly utilized for analytical purposes. Collected primary data were analyzed by using
descriptive and inferential statistical methods such as the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test.

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