After the programmes were approved by the Chinese government, the two partners,
particularly the departmental level programme directors and teaching staff, started to
prepare for setting up the programmes and building quality. The partnership director
described the high expectations the two partners had for the quality of their partnership. He
131 We want to create first-class programmes which blend the strength of the
two parties and have our own characteristics…We would like to make [name of the partnership institution] very successful and unique, one of the best among China’s domestic partnership institutions. (Partnership director, UK)
Due to the ownership of the programmes, it was the Chinese partner’s major responsibility
for developing quality for the first three years. The Chinese managers suggested that their
parent university provided substantial financial support to the initial quality construction,
such as improving the facilities and infrastructures, recruiting high quality teachers, and
promoting marketing activities. While the UK partner contributed more to the development
of the programmes such as curriculum and course design, teacher training and quality
reviews. For example, in terms of curriculum design, the programme directors at the UK
university used the existing curriculum from the UK university as a sample when
designing the curriculum for the partnership programmes. They wanted to make sure
students cover the same core modules. Then, it was the local individual teachers’
responsibility to make other arrangements about the rest of the materials.
Basically, we looked at our current curriculum and put in exactly the same thing, almost one-to-one mapping, and then the individual lecturers who are teaching specific modules will pass this material to the [name of the local partnership institute] colleagues. (Programme director of Maths, UK)
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This sort of curriculum mapping practice is very common in transnational programmes
nowadays. Due to the credit transfer policy requirements, often the foreign university feels
the need of controlling student learning outcomes by controlling learning materials and
curriculum. In this case, the Chinese partner was very willing to borrow the curriculum
materials from the UK partner institution and vice-versa, the UK partner was very willing
to provide the Chinese with the materials. In practice, the Chinese introduced four fifth of
the curriculum from the UK institution. However, the responses of the Deputy Dean
suggested that in reality, it was very difficult to borrow the UK curriculum directly and
transplant it in China because the Chinese academic managers had to take the Chinese government’s education requirements into account at the same time. In the end, they only borrowed the core elements of these materials and made some adjustments to fit into their
local contexts. As the deputy dean of student affairs stated,
I think if we just borrow it directly and transplant it here, we will face difficulties. Because for example, in their education, they have far more limited contact hours than we have. For one module, they only have 20 contact hours, but they ask the students to have 200 hours for independent study. Here we require students to have 96 contact hours, but we do not have requirements for students to have so many independent study hours. So this is the first thing we met some kind of difficulty. On the other side, we had to meet requirements of the MOE, and the Chinese tradition, and then if we follow directly, it doesn’t work. We need to make some adjustments…The most important thing is we borrow the core of education from them. We will make adjustments and try our best to make use of the collaboration. Borrow the good things and help our education to grow. (Deputy dean of student affairs, China)
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In the aspect of teacher arrangements, the data show that teachers teaching at the
partnership institute consisted of: 1) Chinese teachers borrowed from other departments of
the parent university; 2) UK fly-in and fly-out teachers sent from the UK partner university;
3) and international teachers jointly employed by the two institutions who were based at
the local institute. There were complex reasons why the teacher arrangement was made in
this way. First of all, the partnership institute was a second-tier college affiliated with the
Chinese parent university, and the programmes it offered were also built on the basis of the
existing programmes of the parent university from other departments. As such, it relied
heavily on the Chinese parent university supplying teacher resources. Secondly, as
indicated before (Section 6.2.2), the Chinese government required transnational
partnerships to have at least one third of the teaching hours conducted by the foreign
teachers. Despite this, due to the financial practicality issue, the two partners could not
afford to send the UK teachers to teach for a long period. What they did instead was to
send UK teachers to teach twice a year for only two weeks and employed international
teachers who were based locally to shoulder the majority of the teaching. It can be said that
given the conditions, the two partners came up with a rather practical solution. Meanwhile,
in order to assure the quality of the locally-employed international teachers, the UK
academic managers also sat in the interview panels to give opinions. This was seen from
the comments of the UK dean of teaching and learning.
We are not doing that [sending UK teachers once a term to do a lot of teaching] because we trust [name of the Chinese local institution] to employ people on our behalf. And we know that because we have been in the interview panels. We have made a few appointments. And we assume that they will not appoint someone that we don’t like. (Dean of Teaching and Learning, UK)
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The section above presents how the curriculum was designed and how the teacher
arrangements were made in the case study partnership institute. The findings have
demonstrated the forces of the government, the UK home university, and the Chinese
parent university influencing quality assurance approaches in the areas of curriculum
design and teacher arrangements. And, among them all, it appears that the government’s
influence was the stronger than that of the two partner universities. Referring to the
triangle of coordination model, however, the forces of the UK home university and Chinese parent university were not included in Clark’s (1983) model.
The data show that the partnership institute had two major dilemmas during quality
development. The first was to recruit high quality teachers. For example, one UK teacher
trainer indicated that their Chinese counterparts struggled to recruit experienced EAP
(English for Academic Purpose) teachers possibly because the Chinese parent university
was not that attractive in terms of the working conditions or the university ranking.
The reality however is that [name of the partnership institute] have struggled to recruit international teachers three times. They find it difficult to get quality candidates or if they do get quality candidates, they have turned down the offers of the work. The result of three recruitment sessions was they have only managed to recruit two or three teachers from the UK. One of the teachers is quite young but he’s got good experience…And the other international teachers got much less experience and so may not be suited to that role either. (English language teacher trainer, UK)
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The second difficulty was to attract high quality students. Although the Chinese parent
university is a Tier 1 university (not ‘211’ project), which means that students applying for
the transnational programmes have to meet the minimum standard of tier 1 university in X
province of that year, however, as the faculty dean stated, they were faced with the
dilemma of recruiting high quality students. This was because, on the one hand, their
institute was still very young and did not have the same high reputation as the top 10
universities, and consequently high-quality students may not want to study there. On the
other hand, the tuition fees of transnational programmes are higher than that of non-
collaborative ones. That was another factor, whether parents and students could afford such
level of tuition fees. On top of that, the government has put restrictions on tuition fee
standards for second-tier partnership colleges. Although the two parties wanted to recruit
better quality students and charge higher tuition fees, they had to take the market demands
and government policy regulations into account when deciding on tuition fees and student
entry requirements. In the end, they had to lower their original expectations on student
entry requirements and tuition fees, hoping to recover the cost in the near future. The
following statements of the respondents have evidenced the underlying contradictions.
We feel after all, it is a new creature. Many good students are not willing to apply to our institution. Therefore, our student quality is not very high. We are faced with a dilemma that tuition fees are higher than other departments which make it difficult to recruit good students. Apart from these, many students who would like to study in [name of the Chinese parent university] do not necessarily want to come to the [partnership institute]. Some are very determined to apply for the [partnership institute], but their grades are not high enough. I hope we can surpass other colleges in a few years’ time. (Faculty dean, China)
136 The question is how much they are going to charge if the students are not
coming to the UK? Can they charge the same tuition fees as here? I’m not sure. If not, is it sustainable to pay the first 3 years? And the two universities have to get something out of it, right? They are not just paying the staff members. Then it depends on how many students we are thinking to have, 50 students? Are we able to recruit so many students? Are we able to keep them to the very end? So, if you think about it in China, there are a number of similar programmes, and if it is Tsinghua, Fudan University, I’d think about it in a different way. So, it’s up to the parents’ expectations. They are not paying a small amount of money. You can imagine [name of the Chinese local institution] itself. You need to think about what their entry requirement is. And on top of that, you need to think about how many parents are able to afford that. And if they are able to afford that amount of tuition fees, what are their expectations? What is the true gaokao entry level you can set for this institute? I am not sure. I think it will not be at exactly the same level as the standard level. (Programme director of Maths, UK)
What the two respondents meant was that it was very difficult to set up an appropriate
tuition fee level for the partnership institute because they had to take many factors, such as
the university’s reputation and affordability of the programmes for the Chinese parents and
students into consideration. During this period, according to the partnership director,
although the UK university requested their Chinese partner to set up threshold on student
English entry requirements, it was very difficult to achieve this because the Chinese
partner was worried this might cause them to lose many potential applicants. Thus, the UK
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showed that faced with the Chinese local contexts, the UK and Chinese partners had to
make a compromise when deciding on student entry requirements. Linking to Clark’s
model, the findings have reflected the conflicts between the government’s policy
requirements and the two partners’ financial interest on the matter of deciding on student
entry requirements, which also influenced the micro level in terms of the calibre of the
students engaging in the courses.
To summarise, the above section presented the difficulties of recruiting high quality
students and teachers and has highlighted the challenges of quality development for the
case study partnership institute under the current Chinese national and local contexts. On
the one hand, they had to comply with the government’s policy restrictions; on the other,
they had to take the local contexts into consideration. It was very difficult for them to find
the right balance. The findings suggest that there is a need for government policy makers
and university managers to pay attention to how to support this type of partnerships in the
future.
With checks and balances, the two partners held a positive attitude towards the future,
hoping to achieve fruitful results in the long term. The following section presents how the
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