**1. Introduction**

Assuring the quality of higher education institutions in Indonesia face relatively great challenges. These challenges are related to competitions between state, private, and foreign/international universities. The competitions, however, can serve as an encouragement for university administrators to build trust from the community by improving their quality in all aspects. Universities are directed to fulfill such aspects as autonomy, transparency, accountability, quality guarantee, and quality

improvement to maintain community's trust. In addition, according to Javis [1] the quality assurance (QA) regime has been an increasingly dominant regulation tool in managing higher education sectors throughout the world. According to a prediction, nearly half of countries in the world now have a quality assurance system or a QA regulating agency for universities. The accountability and responsibility demands require university to provide the community with quality assurance [2]. As its attempt to guarantee the quality of education, the government through Higher Education Institution Law No. 22/196, as confirmed by Higher Education Institution Law No. 2/1989 has required universities to perform evaluation and accreditation. The provisions on evaluation and accreditation are updated further with a clearer and firmer statement in National Education System Law No. 20/2003 and Government Regulation on National Education Standards which suggests that quality assurance is a necessity, both internally in the form of self-evaluation and externally by proposing for accreditation as lastly amended with the Ministerial Regulations of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia No. 3 Year 2020 on National Higher Education Standards and No. 5 Year 2020 on Study Program and University Accreditations. In relation to these Laws and Government Regulations, the government passes a policy instrument in the form of Government Regulation on Higher Educational Institution which states that quality assessment shall be performed by an independent accreditation board. The aim is to monitor and nurture the quality of universities and to provide guarantee to the community of their quality.

A fairly surprising fact is found by the Directorate of Quality Assurance of Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia that the implementation of Internal Quality Assurance System in various universities have been mapped four times. From the 2008 mappings, only 68 universities had implemented Internal Quality Assurance System well. In 2009, it decreased to only 58 universities and shrinked even further in 2010 to only 24 universities. Only in 2011 that 159 universities were found to have implemented Internal Quality Assurance System well.

Universities in Indonesia is under the monitoring of the government as the supervisor of external quality assurance system (accreditation). The realization in the field shows that the quality of universities have not been assured optimally and satisfactorily. The phenomenon above indicates that 19 years since university autonomy was promoted by the Indonesian government in 2001 through 2020, universities in Indonesia still failed to optimally build an internal quality assurance system.

This is in line with what Jan Kleijnen, Diana Dolmans, Jos Willems, Hans van Hout [3] find in their study entitled "Does internal quality management contribute to more control or to improvement of higher education?" which confirms that quality assurance activities can increase results in education practices. The research conducted by Yingxia Cao and Xiaofan Li [4] entitled "Quality and quality assurance in Chinese private higher education" proves that the application of a quality assurance system can develop higher educational institutions.

The development of an Internal Quality Assurance System in universities in Indonesia, so far, has only focused on developing quality standards. While the novelty of this research is on the development of a quality assurance ecosystem to build a quality culture which is formulated in the form of a model through a knowledge management approach.

## **2. Research objectives**

To analyze a factual model of internal quality assurance system (IQAS) in Indonesia; To develop a knowledge management in Indonesian higher education *Knowledge Management in the Indonesian Higher Education Internal Quality Assurance System… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101874*

internal quality assurance system model; To produce a knowledge management in the Indonesian higher education internal quality assurance system model.
