Purpose: Faculty participation in the assurance of learning (AoL) is requisite both for the effective operation of the system and for accreditation compliance, but faculty often resist engaging in AoL tasks. The purpose of this paper is to provide specific recommendations to address faculty concerns and to guide AoL systems toward maturity. Design/methodology/approach: This paper provides a comprehensive model of faculty resistance perspectives aligned to AoL maturity, provides specific responses to faculty resistance and introduces success markers of progress toward maturity. Findings: Specifically, a three-stage model of AoL system maturity is presented and aligned with five faculty perspectives. For each faculty perspective, responses targeting causal factors are proposed and signs of progress toward the next level of faculty engagement are highlighted. Practical implications: Faculty and AoL leaders will be able to identify their current stage of AoL system maturity and implement practical solutions to move to the next stage of system maturity. Social implications: Understanding the motivations for faculty resistance will facilitate more meaningful and effective internal interactions as a school seeks to improve its AoL system. In turn, a more effective AoL system will promote better learning experiences for students; and better learning allows students to become productive in their chosen careers more quickly, thus improving society as a whole. Originality/value: To the knowledge, no prior paper has organized faculty resistance along a maturity continuum, provided targeted responses based on the level of maturity or included signs that indicate growth toward the next level of maturity.

Chinese higher education (HE) 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 HE, the issue of quality has become a concern and has attracted a lot of attention in the Chinese HE sector. Developing quality assurance (QA) systems has been given priority in the agenda of most Chinese higher education institutions (HEIs). The nationwide implementation of quality evaluation since 2002 is the main means used by the Chinese government to address the potential quality decline and to realise a macro level control of quality over Chinese HEIs. This study 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 QA schemes. The purpose of this study is to explore how student learning experiences can be integrated into the QA systems in Chinese HEIs for continuous quality improvement. A qualitative case study approach is adopted in this study. Document analysis, focus groups, and in-depth interviews are used to achieve a comprehensive qualitative inquiry into student learning experiences, HEIs’ QA practice, and the integration of student learning experiences into QA system. Through this study, we find that Chinese universities generally use regulations, teaching inspection/evaluation, and student feedback as the main approaches to manage their QA practice. There is great emphasis on the institutional management and teaching management, but little attention given to what students are actually doing. The analysis of the key issues in student learning experiences, the concept of quality learning, and the analysis of the objectives, control, areas, procedures and uses in the current Chinese QA systems suggest a discrepancy between student quality learning and what the current Chinese QA assures. The findings of this study imply that the current top-down QA has great limitations in addressing key issues in student learning and accordingly plays a limited role in generating educational quality. As the conclusion of this study, a learning-focused QA is proposed to offer insights into integrating student learning generically into the QA process for the purpose of the continuous improvement of HE quality.