Toward a Comprehensive Quality Assurance Framework for Continuing Education in Universities

From the global popularity of lifelong learning, people are looking for opportunities to improve their competence that triggers a booming market demand for continuing education. Developing a new strategy for this new challenge becomes the critical mission for universities to pursue the excellence in continuing education. To implement quality assurance mechanisms into administrative and operating systems, many universities were seeking international accreditations, for example, ISO 9000 family, and were implementing an organization-wide quality management system. However, in recent years, most universities started to consider the appropriateness of quality management system and shift to educational quality assurance systems, such as IWA 2:2003, ISO 10015, or Taiwan Training Quality System (TTQS), that guarantee a quality of education. In this research, we conducted an analysis of related literature to track and compare different quality assurance frameworks. Based on the analysis, practices and experiences in the selected case were considered to modify and improve original models.