Making Disruptive innovation work to achieve accreditation of HE programs

(This post is a quest to find how Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation can be applied in the field of Quality assurance and accreditation of university (HEIs) programs).

Dr. Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), has rightly advocated for a “greater disruption” as a response to the “changing landscape” to meet “changing expectations of accreditation” and take advantage of the “disruptive impact” of all innovations and modifications. She raised an important question: To what extent are accreditors paying attention to innovation? (https://www.chea.org/how-disruption-can-contribute-future-success-accreditation) Perhaps it is time to consider the use of disruptive innovation in the field of QA and accreditation as well. Michael B. Horn & Alana Dunagan of Christensen Institute Innovation and Quality Assurance, raise concern over how the accreditation model is “stifling” the innovation in HEIs. It reiterates our belief that any kind of “disruptive innovation” challenges the status quo, enables a changed mindset and focuses on ensuring the acceptability of any change.

Before going ahead, let’s first understand what is the theory of “Disruptive Innovation” as provided on HBS online website https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-disruptive-innovation: “Disruptive innovation is the process by which a smaller company—usually with fewer resources—moves upmarket and challenges larger, established businesses. The process begins with a small company entering the low end of a market, or creating a new market segment, claiming the least profitable portion of the market as its own. Because the established, incumbent companies own the most profitable market segments, they most likely won’t fight the entrant for that market share. The entrant then improves its offerings and moves upmarket with increasing profitability. Once the incumbents’ customers have widely adopted the entrant’s offerings in the mainstream market, disruption has occurred.” This definition shows how a small company at the low end of a market can rise to achieve higher goals, a higher market share, a wider acceptability; in other words can “disrupt” the whole market through innovative practices, or to put rightly, through the application of disruptive innovation.

In another definition by the Christensen Institute. “disruptive innovation” is used to explain a phenomenon that transforms an existing market or sector by introducing such elements like convenience, accessibility, and affordability as differentiating factors (https://www.christenseninstitute.org/key-concepts/disruptive-innovation-2/). A product or service may appear unattractive initially, but eventually its innovative spirit completely redefines the customers’ mindsets. Classic examples of such innovation are the Uber, Netflix, Smartphones, etc. Amazon, Google, and Facebook can also be seen as companies that used Internet as a disruptive technology. A very interesting element in all such products and services is that such disruptive innovations are not breakthrough technologies; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a much larger population.

When a disruption in higher education is explored, it needs to be innovative, potentially penetrative into colleges and universities, into their curriculum, and teaching and learning practices. The use of technology, AI and Blended learning in a virtual environment are recent examples of such disruptions These disruptions are innovative in the sense that they challenged the traditional teaching and learning patterns. Due to COVID-19, this disruption further helped in bringing resilience and successfully running online classes.

In the field of QA and Accreditation, innovation may be complicated owing to the complex nature of colleges and universities, and more due to the internal assessors and QA coordinators whose traditional understanding of accreditation is limited to collecting evidences of compliance of accreditation standards and reporting about resources and processes rather than attainment of student outcomes.

The question here arises that without innovation how can we redefine and reinvent our QA and accreditation practices and make them compatible to the changing landscape? Or What are the pre-requisites to apply disruptive innovation in quality and accreditation?

1. First, in order to be disruptive, the academicians and the Quality assessors must be audacious and courageous. The legacy of Quality Assurance is big evidence of having disrupted the entire domain several times. The Bologna process, for instance, emphasized on collaboration and coordination, “balanced accountability” and compatibility of quality standards. Washington accord went a step ahead and introduced the mutual recognition system of engineering degree programmes of all signatory member nations.

2. Secondly, the accreditation procedures have been revamped several times in the form of audit procedures, internal and external reviews, inclusion and exclusion criteria based on national qualification frameworks (NQFs), duration of study, and emphasis on such elements like quality of teaching and research, learning outcomes and Key performance indicators (KPIs). Accreditation norms have also differed for each specialization.

3. Last, but not the least, focus has shifted from institutional learning outcomes to program learning outcomes (PLOs) as well as course learning outcomes (CLOs), in an attempt to achieve Outcome Based Education (OBE).

All these can be seen as disruptions in the field of QA and accreditation. The policy makers and accreditation service providers feel happier to implement these frequently happening modifications (or disruptions). It was thought that changes in templates and reporting procedures would really make faculty and academicians “accountable” towards quality of education and would pave the way to OBE. But such disruptions lacked innovation.

I wish to suggest that “disruptive innovation” is required more in the execution and compliance of the accreditation norms and standards rather than in changing their framework, templates, and reporting procedures. Students’ learning outcomes also need to be better defined and shown how to align them to the program and institutional learning outcomes. There is a lot of ambiguity about direct and indirect assessment methods and distribution of weightages across each assessment method. A few programs also often fail to create innovative rubrics that might make it easier to assess the CLO-PLO attainment. The QA committees in HEIs need to adopt creative and innovative measures to resolve such ambiguities and build a participative quality culture. There is also a need to professionalize the faculty and staff and mold them into the essential character of Quality Assurance. This requires breaking the bureaucratic set-ups and use QA as a tool for innovation and improvement.

It is high time that institutions devise essential QA practices that could be termed as “disruptive innovations” including decentralization, employee empowerment, a positive bottom-up approach, top management support and a robust internal mechanism to ensure compliance of all accreditation prerequisites.