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The introduction discusses how the digital trend that has substantially disrupted other sectors is transforming the higher education sector or even posing a threat to academic institutions’ core business. What could be the rationale for higher education institutions to incorporate a comprehensive digital agenda into their core strategy? Outlining the main developments over the past years in the areas of education, research and knowledge sharing, the authors argue that academic institutions are still far from grasping the full potential of what the digital offers to the academy. Not only does the adoption of online and open practices allow universities to respond to major challenges facing them today, but a digital vision also allows higher education institutions to re-define their role in society. Subsequently, the authors outline how the examples discussed in the book, stemming from a variety of academic contexts, will enrich our understanding of what ‘moving online’ might entail and how to make it work in practice.

As an afterthought to the chapters in the book, this epilogue plays with the idea of looking to the future by briefly examining what is happening at earlier stages of education today. By understanding some of the objectives of the Finnish national core curriculum 2014 and taking a look at the practices at school, we can imagine the optimal skillsets that a now 12-year-old child will have when they enter higher education in a few years’ time. Optimally, we will be faced with a person with a developed understanding of how they learn best, a creative learner and problem-solver with skills in meaningful use of technology. This chapter argues that it does not mean the efficient future learners will not require teaching; on the contrary, we will continue to need competent pedagogical thinkers to guide the students on their individual paths to lifelong-learning.

State lawmakers looking to increase public university accountability have implemented policies which aim to monitor, reward and sanction schools based on completion rates. These policies have mainly emerged as performance-based funding (PBF) policies, which tie state appropriations to institutional performance and student outcomes. As of 2014, 26 states adopted a form of performance-based funding policy, with four more programs awaiting implementation. Despite the intuitive appeal of performance-based funding policies, higher education scholars have debated the degree to which these policies accomplish the intended goals. The scholarly record includes both studies that find PBF policies to be successful and studies that find no evidence of effectiveness. The existence of findings on both sides has led many to describe the body of work as ‘mixed’, with no real sense of whether these findings are trending in a particular direction. In an effort to improve our ability to speak holistically about this body of work, we conduct a meta-analysis which aims to aggregate and analyse the quantitative findings on the effect of performance funding policies on public four-year and two-year university outcomes.

One of the most long-lived debates within quality assurance is whether and how control and enhancement are related. This is an important debate related to how improved performance and accountability can best be achieved. While this issue has tended to cause heated public debates, there are fewer empirical studies analysing the relationship between these concepts. In the current chapter we investigate the student perceptions of control and enhancement, and ask whether these concepts are mutually exclusive. Based on a survey targeting European students, our findings suggest that ‘quality assurance as control’ and ‘quality assurance as enhancement’ may not be very relevant concepts from a student perspective. Our analysis suggests that students perceive quality in multiple and quite complex ways, and that pure control or improvement understandings of quality are difficult to identify. An implication of these findings is that quality assurance should be designed in ways that take into account the complexity of higher education and its stakeholders. The chapter ends by reflecting upon possible future directions of quality assurance, not least with respect to how the current interest in student-centred teaching carries the potential of transforming the ways in which higher education is evaluated.

This chapter provides an overview of the different purposes that underlie the massive development of indicators in higher education policy. To that end, this chapter concentrates on the use of indicators for higher education policy by central level authorities. It starts by presenting a series of trends within and outside higher education systems, which provides the context in which to explain the current popularity of indicators. Second, it proposes a classification of purposes and uses of indicators for public policy in higher education. Finally, using international comparison, it attempts to link the underlying purposes for indicator development to national administrative traditions and steering approaches used by public authorities for their higher education systems. This discussion provides evidence for the main argument that indicators are developed to support the logic of a national higher education governance framework, which may be geared either to systems’ control, accountability to stakeholders or the enhancement of competition in the sector.