The Role of Educational Leadership and Instructors in Improving Quality in Higher Education: The Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Dhar El Mehraz at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University as a Case Study

Abstract

Higher education has known many changes with the start of the 21st century. Moreover, with the rise of massification, internationalization and globalization, quality in higher education is facing multiple challenges. If Moroccan higher education wants to claim its own place among leading higher education systems, it has to pour its focus on the quality of the education it offers to its students. Among the key players in higher education who contribute substantially to the enhancement of quality are educational leaders and instructors. Investigating the practices that they engage in is one way to examine quality in higher education. The main objective of this thesis is to gauge the frequencies by which educational leaders and instructors engage in quality practices in the School of Letters and Human Sciences in Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University as well as have an in-depth understanding of their experiences. The thesis also aims at examining instructors‘ self-perceptions of their practices, and their perceptions of their educational leaders‘ practices in the institution as well. In order to reach these aims, a survey was conducted to explore these perceptions quantitatively and qualitatively, and a mixed methods analysis was used to understand and analyze what practices they employ and why they do so. The data was collected through administering questionnaires to the participants virtually, and the data was processed through the use of Google Forms and Microsoft Excel. The data was presented in the form of graph charts and respondent testimonies. Finally, the findings of the study suggest that both instructors and educational leaders help improve the quality of their institution most of the time; however, they still face challenges at the institutional level that do not empower them to help improve the quality of their institution to the best of their ability.