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.