EUA projekt: QAHECA

New EUA project: Call for applications

EUA, together with its partners ACQUIN, the Higher Education Academy and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth is launching a new project - Quality Assurance for the Higher Education Change Agenda (QAHECA) – which is supported by the European Commission in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme.

The consortium is inviting higher education institutions (HEI) and quality assurance agencies from across Europe to apply for participation in the project. A total of 30 institutions and agencies will be selected to take part.

The project offers participants the opportunity for active involvement in the pilot project, which is dedicated to developing and testing institutional quality mechanisms for teaching and learning. Taking the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area as its starting point, the new project seeks to formulate a methodology which is geared towards enhancement and will strengthen creativity and innovation in higher education.

Quality mechanisms are recognised as indispensable tools for the internal development of HEIs as well as their external accountability. In recent years, the groundwork for quality mechanisms in higher education has been prepared through the experiences of individual institutions and agencies alike, and a number of projects and initiatives at the European level. However, legitimate concerns have been raised about the detrimental effects of quality assurance processes (e.g. over-bureaucratisation, standardisation, “QA fatigue”, compliance behaviour, stifling creativity and innovation) in national and European higher education reform debates.

This new project has been designed to develop a methodology for institutional quality processes for teaching and learning which will address these problematic aspects. The goal is to explore what kind of institutional quality processes for teaching and learning, both internal and external, will support creative and innovative higher education institutions and limit the potentially problematic effects of these processes. QAHECA seeks to develop operational recommendations for a formative quality methodology which provides the necessary space for originality while at the same time observing the requirements for institutional steering mechanisms and accountability.

Participants will be invited to take part in a series of three seminars. The first two seminars will be dedicated to developing a draft quality methodology through a variety of activities (review of case studies, analysis of the strengths and drawbacks of existing quality mechanisms etc.). Then each HEI and agency will be invited to review and test the draft methodology within their own context and design an implementation plan. The third seminar will be dedicated to jointly analysing participants’ preliminary experience with the draft methodology and their implementation plans as well as formulate recommendations for the project report.