Occasional Papers

This report presents considerations for quality assurance of e-learning provision by the ENQA Working group VIII on Quality Assurance and E-learning.

This report presents the findings of the ENQA working group on quality assurance and recognition’s research into determining the state of the art – including roles, interests, mandates, policies, and practices – where QA agencies and issues of academic recognition are concerned.

The present publication reports the findings of the “Quality Assurance of Cross-border Higher Education (QACHE)” project. This report summarises the findings from several data collection phases which included surveys, in-depth country reports, and regional forums. The gathered information resulted in the production of the project’s key outcomes – the Toolkit for Quality Assurance Agencies and recommendations for policymakers at the national and European level – and revealed a further need for better facilitation and strengthened cooperation in the quality assurance of cross-border higher education.

This document represents the latest efforts of the ENQA Staff Development Group, as a follow-up to an initial report from April 2014 in which the working group identified, at a high level, the common core competencies of quality assurance and quality enhancement professionals in ENQA member agencies.

This Toolkit is the result of a project co-financed by the Erasmus Mundus Programme of the European Union and coordinated by the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). The project, called Quality Assurance of CrossBorder Higher Education (QACHE), aimed at enhancing the quality assurance of higher education provided across national borders. In the context of the QACHE project, cross-border higher education (CBHE) refers to any learning activity in which the students are based in a different country from the country in which the institution providing the education is located. This includes the cross-border mobility of study programmes and higher education providers, such as branch campuses overseas, collaborative partnerships in the form of joint-programmes, validation or franchising arrangements, and distance learning provision, but excludes international student mobility.

The publication is based on the findings of the “Transparency of European higher education through public quality assurance reports (EQArep)” project. This report investigates the current state of content, structure and publication of quality assurance reports while trying to understand the expectations and demands of stakeholders with regard to these reports. This report sheds light on the existing gap between what is expected by the stakeholders and the reality of the situation. In addition, the report provides QA agencies with a set of European Guidelines for summary reports and some generic recommendations on the structure and publication of the comprehensive reports in order to support these agencies in producing reports with understandable and comparable information.

This report records the discussions of the ENQA Working Group on Excellence over a period of two years and reflects the progress made in describing, evaluating and defining the concept of excellence in higher education. It considers various approaches to the recognition of excellence in higher education, and includes recommendations on how the concept could be applied in the context of the work of quality agencies.

The European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) has been organised by the E4 Group (ENQA, ESU, EUA, and EURASHE) since 2006. The 8th Forum, held at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, showed once again that quality assurance professionals derive significant benefits from meeting and exchanging ideas with their colleagues from various national and organisational backgrounds.

Participants from approximately 50 countries, including academics and administrators responsible for internal quality assurance, students, representatives from QA agencies, national authorities, intergovernmental organisations and researchers in quality development in higher education and research, exchanged, discussed and debated together for three days, true to the spirit of this year’s theme “Working together to take quality forward”.

This publication gathers together a sample of the contributions to the Forum, and hopes to serve as an inspiration to everyone involved in QA.