Whither online education? Auditing the entrepreneurial university

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) audited Australian universities. At the same time, universities were increasingly using online learning technologies. Little has been written about how these two significant changes in teaching and learning might be acting and interacting at a time of increasing focus by universities on the educational marketplace. This book investigates the AUQA audits of three Australian universities which had different locations in the Australian higher education marketplace and had different approaches to the use of online technologies. Reid uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse a wide range of artefacts by and about the universities. It is argued that AUQA's audits do not support institutions' various market positionings, but rather provide the imprimatur of 'brand Australia' by producing representations of each institution that are safe and amenable to the audit process. The bounding and limiting effect of the 'quality university' discourse over the outward reaching 'online university' discourse resulted in the three universities being represented in increasingly isomorphic ways.