At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) began to audit Australian universities. At the same time, universities were increasingly using online technologies for teaching and learning. Little is known about how these two significant changes in teaching and learning might be acting and interacting at a time of increasing focus by universities on the educational marketplace. This thesis investigates the AUQA audits carried out in 2002 of three Australian universities which had different locations in the Australian higher education marketplace and had different approaches to the use of online technologies. I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse a range of artefacts produced between 2002 and 2005 by and about the universities. I analyse the first three editions of the AUQA manual, the universities' web sites before and after their audit, the submissions of those universities to AUQA, and the audit reports by AUQA on them. I explore the role that representations of the "online university" discourse play in constructions of a "quality university" discourse within these texts. I discovered a number of shifts in emphasis in the texts over time. Notions of the "online university", while prevalent in the texts produced early in the time frame of the study, were absent from later texts. Also, texts produced early in the study represented the three universities as very different institutions. However texts examined towards the end of the study represented the universities to be more similar in nature. Given the diverse nature of the institutions' market locations, I found that quality assurance processes work to reduce the representation of institutional diversity. There was evidence that the "online university" discourse came to be used more as a marketing tool and less as a marker of quality education over the time period of the study. I argue that AUQA's audits do not support institutions? various market positionings as described by Marginson and Considine (2000), but rather provide the imprimatur of "brand Australia" by producing representations of each institution that are safe and amenable to the audit process. The "online university" discourse speaks of new and borderless teaching strategies, while the "quality university" discourse speaks of containment and control of university activities. The bounding and limiting effect of the "quality university" discourse over the outward reaching "online university" discourse resulted in the three universities representing themselves in increasingly isomorphic ways. My analysis shows that over the time frame of the study, the surveillance of a national quality audit body, through self-audit by universities and the subsequent publication of reviews of universities by that body, produced more cautious representations of the universities and ironically, less direct influence by the audit body over universities? actions in the marketplace. The study suggests that the degree of influence which the ?online university? discourse and the "quality university" discourse have on the representations of universities is dependent largely on the degree to which they can impel universities within the market. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2007
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/288060 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Reid, Ian C |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | EN-AUS |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright 2007 Ian Reid |
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