23 September 2014 All Day
EQArep project final conference
The final conference of the project took place on 23 September in Brussels, Belgium on the premises of the University Foundation.
The conference gathered nearly 60 participants from QA agencies and other stakeholder representatives such as higher education institutions, students, employer representatives, European and national policymakers.
In addition to the dissemination of the project results and future perspectives, the discussions focused on stakeholders’ perspectives on the use and usefulness of QA reports, QA agencies’ perspective on the features of good QA reports and a panel discussion on expectations of different target /user groups of QA reports.
The final publication of the project was distributed to the participants during the final conference. This publication presents the final outcomes of the project including the findings of the two surveys respectively on “stakeholders requirements for transparency” and “publication of QA reports: purpose, structure and content” as well as the set of recommendations for QA reports.
Please click here to download the conference programme.
Links to the conference presentations are available below:
Padraig Walsh, QQI
Achim Hopbach, AQ Austria
Maiki Udam, EKKA
Stephanie Hering, OAQ
Durdica Dragojevic, ASHE
The final report is available here.
Photos from the event are available on the ENQA facebook page.
What is EQArep?
Higher education institutions in Europe face a growing interest among students and all stakeholders and the public at large in accessing detailed and reliable information on individual study programmes, faculties and higher education institutions, but especially on the quality at programme and at institutional level.
The current external evaluation reports published by quality assurance (QA) agencies vary greatly between countries across the European Higher Education area (EHEA) in terms of structure and content but also regarding the publication strategies and means. Thus, the contribution of the external QA reports to the comparative dimension of transparency of higher education at the European level is still relatively limited as these reports are not always easily readable and understandable by the potential user groups.
The EU funded EQArep project aims to contribute to the increasing demand for transparent, comparable and reliable information on the quality and quality assurance of European higher education. To this end, the project has mapped the current QA reports’ publication practices by QA agencies and explored the different needs of stakeholders for transparent and comparable information in order to develop a set of “European recommendations for QA reports”.