Webinar #1: What Might the International Quality Assurance Community Do?

The Webinar addressed issues including areas of corruption in which the international quality assurance community takes a prominent role, what kinds of actions might the community take, ways to galvanize quality assurance colleagues to provide leadership to combat corruption, who are natural allies and stakeholders and how might the academic community reach out to them and how responses to these questions could provide a foundation for the development of an action plan.

Major themes included:

• People acknowledge and care about the seriousness and complexity of the academic corruption issue.
• Facing corruption head-on — calling it what it is, facing it "squarely" — is essential to moving forward.
• There is a role for media/communications working with higher education institutions and quality assurance bodies to enhance both visibility and importance of fighting corruption.
• There is a role for working with students — understanding how they are affected by a culture of corruption, understanding that they may be drawn into such a culture and developing training for students — as part of attacking corruption.
• Although there are many Websites, reports, etc., there is still some need for information aggregation on corruption.
• The Webinar demonstrated that academic corruption is present everywhere: in developed and developing countries alike.

The Webinar featured an expert panel including: