The Transnational European Evaluation Project (TEEP) was a pilot project conducted by ENQA and its member agencies between June 2002 and October 2003. It explored the operational implications of a European transnational quality evaluation of study programmes in three subject areas: History, Physics and Veterinary Science.
The TEEP I pilot project was supported by the European Commission through the SOCRATES programme. It was part of a package of measures initiated by the European Commission in order to stimulate the Bologna Process. TEEP was coordinated by ENQA with the participation and contribution of the SOCRATES Thematic Networks of the three respective disciplines.
The project engaged three member agencies of ENQA: Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (UK), Danish Evaluation Institute and Agencia per la Qualitat del Sistema Universitaria Catalunya. The evaluation was conducted in fourteen higher education institutions in eleven different European countries.
The aims of the TEEP I project were to:
- further develop a method for transnational external evaluation, building on experiences such as the TUNING project and the Dublin Descriptors (doc) developed through the Joint Quality Initiative, using common criteria on the basis of an evaluation process in three different disciplines;
- identify potential obstacles to transnational evaluation and indicate strategies that might be used to overcome them;
- contribute to greater awareness, transparency and compatibility within European higher education.
The approach of using common criteria provided the basis for making comparisons possible. The common criteria functioned as shared reference points and ensured that the same topics were evaluated across the three disciplines. The TEEP experience suggested that any future transnational evaluation project should establish criteria compatible with national and local contexts and use terminology familiar and useful for the programmes being evaluated.
The project stimulated discussions about the need for the programmes to develop explicit quality assurance strategies. It also showed that when national states have been committed to reach political objectives such as the Bologna Process, it is easier to reach a common position. TEEP provided a valuable insight into the condition for the implementation of the Bologna Process at a programme level.
See the TEEP methodological report (pdf) and subject-specific reports (History (pdf), Physics and Veterinary Science (pdf)) for details.