Representatives of the Agency for Control and Quality Assurance of Higher Education participated in a workshop on quality assurance and recognition of qualifications in higher education. The workshop was held on October 26, 2022 in Zagreb, in the organization of the Secretariat of the Education Reform Initiative of South Eastern Europe (ERI SEE).
At the workshop, the representative of the Agency for Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia presented the experience in ensuring the quality of higher education, through accreditation and reaccreditation procedures. The presentation included all the stages foreseen in the evaluation procedures, with a special emphasis on the training of experts and the way in which training is conducted in Croatia, follow-up procedures and obligations of institutions to submit action plans and reports on the implementation of action plans, as well as the standards that are directly related to the recognition of qualifications in higher education and the method of their evaluation.
In the process of evaluating study programs and institutions of higher education, IT support is an important segment, so the representatives of the Agency for Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia, the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia, as well as the National Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Quality in Higher Education presented their internal information systems. This kind of support enables the monitoring of all stages of the evaluation process, both by agencies and institutions, but also provides the opportunity to share data on the evaluations, which is of particular importance in the processes of verification and recognition of qualifications in higher education.
During the first part of the workshop, the DEQAR project (database of external quality assurance reports), its advantages and benefits, as well as activities related to its further development, were presented.
In the second part of the workshop, all participants (representatives of national QA agencies) presented the current situation regarding the level of development of information systems, as a kind of support for the evaluation process in their agencies. In addition, the challenges and future needs of the agencies were identified, which will be the starting point for planning further activities within the ERI SEE Initiative.