ACQAHE representatives participated in The fourth workshop within the SEQA-ESG project, which aims to support European quality assurance agencies in achieving European standards and guidelines (ESG).
The workshop was held in Malta on June 28 and 29, 2022, in the organization of the coordinator – the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). Representatives of the agencies and ministries of Malta, Slovakia, Moldova, Albania, the Czech Republic and Montenegro attended this workshop, as well as experts on the project: Cristina Ghitulica (Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance – ARACIS) and Ronny Heintze (German Agency AQAS).
The fourth SEQA-ESG workshop addressed the issue of involvement and participation of stakeholders (students, representatives of business and professional associations, representatives of higher education institutions and teaching staff, as well as alumni…) methods and criteria for their selection in governing bodies and the procedures of evaluation. Those topics corresponded to standard 3.1 of European standards and guidelines, related to the Involvement of experts.
The president of ENQA, Douglas Blackstock, stated at the beginning of the workshop that the best thing about the application of ESGs is that they are flexible and adaptable to different quality assurance systems. Expert Heintze introduced the workshop attendees in detail to the content and goal of standard 3.1, while expert Ghitulica presented the practical application of the standard in Romanian agency.
During the discussion, all participants had the opportunity to present the current situation in their agencies and learn about the challenges of their project partners in meeting the above-mentioned standard. This was followed by solving a practical problem in groups.
The conclusions of the workshop are: applying standard 3.1 and including stakeholders in the management structures of quality assurance agencies, as well as in all evaluation procedures. This represents the key in order to meeting quality in accordance with European standards and guidelines. Without the participation of all interested parties (students, the academic community, the business sector…), it is impossible to imagine a high-quality evaluation procedure of institutions and study programs, and the quality of higher education.
The workshop ended with positive impressions from the participants, with the hope that the received recommendations will be implemented in the future activities of agencies that have not applied them in their work yet.