Internal Quality Assurance--Facing Common Challenges. ENQA Workshop Report 13
Author: Blackstock, Douglas
Date: 2010-00-00
Type: Collected Works - Proceedings
Subjects: Higher Education,Quality Control,Stakeholders,Foreign Countries,Seminars,Lifelong Learning,Organizational Effectiveness,Program Effectiveness,Quality Circles,Quality Assurance,Institutional Research,Followup Studies,Academic Standards,National Standards,Standard Setting,Context Effect,Barriers,Accountability,Policy Analysis,Agencies,Educational Quality,Workshops,Organizational Culture,Accreditation (Institutions),Educational Strategies,Educational Change

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA seminar in Barcelona in 2008 on &quot;Internal quality assurance systems and the ESG.&quot; The seminar in The Hague focused on the theme &quot;Internal Quality Assurance--Facing Common Challenges.&quot; Staff members of ENQA member agencies discussed the common, tangible challenges they frequently encounter in their daily operations. The seminar drew up a list of the operations that are in paper prescribed as standardised procedures, but in practice often turn out to be issues difficult to outline and therefore to measure and standardise. Some of the approaches adopted in the seminar included revealing some of the key issues in the implementation of procedural improvements; measuring of processes and outcomes of an agency's missions and goals; guaranteeing of efficient and excellent operations and following-up on external feedback. Discussing common challenges among quality assurance agencies is certainly one of the most concrete ways for building a common understanding and thereafter improving the internal quality assurance operations of agencies. ENQA fully supports the open sharing of challenges in order to gain better ways for the full implementation of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) at all levels; in higher education institutions and in quality assurance agencies, both externally and internally. Articles included in this report are: (1) Assessing QAA's effectiveness (Douglas Blackstock); (2) An outsider's view on IQA: Quality culture or quality procedures (Lee Harvey); (3) External evaluation of HAC: Follow-up activities (Tibor Szanto); (4) Internal quality assurance of agencies: Standardisation and contextualisation (Riitta Pyykko); (5) Common challenges for QAAs: ENQA Review Committee perspective (Guy Aelterman); (6) Transparency, accountability and stakeholders' protection in the Andalusian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education and Research: An analysis of our reporting and publication policy (Mariano Lopez-Benitez, Esperanza Vera-Toscano, and Elias Fereres); (7) Internal Quality Assurance in the French Agency for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (AERES) (Claude Cassagne and Jean-Francois Dhainaut); and (8) Quality as a fundamental index in the development of modern higher education (Ivan Babyn and Viktoriya Lykova). The IQA Seminar program is appended. (Contains 1 figure and 12 footnotes.)