Information Systems Applications in Quality Assurance of State Universities in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Following the global trend, Sri Lankan state universities focus on quality assurance of teachinglearning while standardizing the study programmes. Scholars have broadly discussed the prevailing issues of quality assurance activities of the higher education context. Accordingly, some of the quality assurance activities have become an additional burden for university staff. Although universities employ many information systems, their contribution to the quality assurance process is limited. The objectives of this study are to explore the information systems applications in the quality assurance context and the expected improvements of such information systems to cater for the quality assurance process. An online questionnaire was used to collect the respective data from the staff of the 13 state universities from January to May 2021. According to the results, information systems can be employed to provide required evidence for quality assurance reviews and facilitate quality assurance activities. But existing information systems need more improvements to cater for the quality assurance requirements such as information provision and facilitate the quality assurance activities. Accordingly, this study concludes the necessity of more improvements of existing information systems to facilitate the quality assurance requirements.