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Examining quality culture in higher education institutions (EQC) Print Email this page

With its partners HRK German Rectors’ conference and QAA Scotland, EUA launched in October 2009 a new project: Examining quality culture in higher education institutions (EQC).

EQC aims to:

1. Analyse the development of quality culture in HEIs and provide an overall picture of the internal quality assurance in place in HEIs across the 46 Bologna Process countries. In particular, the project aims at mapping the progress made in implementing internal quality assurance processes. This will be achieved through a survey questionnaire to HEIs.

2. Identify, analyse and disseminate good practices that apply to HEIs’ internal quality assurance. This will be achieved through analysing the material provided by the HEIs in the survey responses and through interviews verifying the information received.

The quality of European higher education is at the heart of the European Higher Education Area and European countries have committed to supporting the development of quality assurance (QA) at institutional, national and European level. In the Berlin communiqué the ministers of education acknowledged that the “primary responsibility for quality assurance in higher education lies with each institution itself”.

Since the Berlin ministerial meeting European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) have been developed by the E4 group (ENQA, EUA, EURASHE and ESU) and adopted by the ministers of education in Bergen in 2005. ESG provides a common European ground for quality assurance at institutional and national level.

Each of the signatory countries has developed national QA systems for higher education and good information exists on these external QA systems. The European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR), founded in 2008, will provide information on which QA agencies operating in Europe have proven their credibility and reliability in a review against the ESG.

So far, however, no overall study has been made on how HEIs across the 46 Bologna signatories have actually responded to the standards identified by the ESG. This project will tackle this question and aims at providing HEIs, policy makers as well as other stakeholders, for the first time, with an overall picture on the internal quality assurance processes actually in place within HEIs. This information will be useful for further development of the quality of European higher education.

The project builds on the three rounds of EUA’s Quality Culture (QC) Project (2002-2006), which aimed at identifying the basic principles of creating an efficient quality culture within HEIs, and which took place at a time when quality assurance within the European higher education was developing. It can be assumed that great progress has now been made within HEIs regarding their quality assurance processes since then and this project will provide information on the ways in which quality culture is developing.

The project activities can be divided into two phases corresponding to the aims of the project:

- Phase 1 (2010): a survey questionnaire to HEIs addressing the part of the ESG dedicated to internal QA within HEIs. A publication presenting the results will be prepared in order to disseminate the results.

The questionnaire was launched in February 2010.

- Phase 2 (2010 – 2011): Identifying the most promising good practices through open questions of the above mentioned questionnaire, checking and analysing the information provided on these practices, and presenting the identified good practices in a final report in order to disseminate them.

The final publication on good practices in internal quality assurance processes is expected by September 2011.

For any questions or further information on the EQC project, please contact eqc@eua.be.