ABSTRACT
Imagine an institution fraught with quality problems, where the staff are too busy and too nervous to address them, and discussions about quality (or the lack of it) occur in surreptitious conversations, emails and phone calls. Imagine, too, an institution where understanding about management directions is unclear and bureaucracy is rife, where controversial proposals cannot receive endorsement by committees and where staff just keep their heads down and concentrate on their own work. Imagine also that there is a growing demand for institutional quality assurance (QA) but that the use of external quality assurance (EQA) is prohibitively expensive. This scenario is typical of many educational institutions across the globe, particularly in developing countries. It is the context in which the Commonwealth of Learning Review and Improvement Model (COL RIM) (Commonwealth of Learning, 2010) seeks to make a difference.
