At a time when more students than ever are attending higher education, its provision is becoming more fluid, global and competitive. For example, developments in new technologies mean that higher education institutions (HEIs) can make their courses available all over the world. These developments bring into question the traditional delivery model…

The development of accreditation agencies within the Higher Education sector in order to assess and guarantee the quality of services or product is still a growing phenomenon in Europe. Accreditations are conceived by institutional authors and by authors who directly deal with quality assurance processes as a means of legitimization or a means of…

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has been planned as an ongoing program of assessment. The first cycle of the assessment has involved two "rounds." The first round, which is covered by this report, took place over the period of January 2008-October 2013. The main features of the first cycle of…

The theme of qualifications frameworks and their relation to quality assurance is gaining urgency in the European scene as more and more countries are completing their national qualifications frameworks and quality assurance agencies need to take important decisions on how to implement them. Some of the key features of the qualifications…

This 2010 edition of the "Focus" report has been prepared for the European Ministerial Conference in Budapest/Vienna, 11-12 March 2010, that officially launches the European Higher Education Area. The report has been developed as a fully collaborative exercise between the Eurydice Network and the Bologna Follow-up Group (BFUG), with the…

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to question the appropriateness of a proposal for a new European Qualifications Framework. The framework has three perspectives: historical; analytical; and national. Design/methodology/approach: The approaches are diverse since the first insists on the institutional and decision-making processes at European…

The title of this document is a deliberate play on the title of the biennial reports on the progress of Bologna produced by the European Students' Union, "Bologna With Student Eyes." It is a way of paying tribute to student involvement in the Bologna reforms, and marking a parallel student working participation in the state system…

For many years, the European evaluation community did not recognize evaluation standards as a relevant tool for quality assurance. References to the developments in the United States were exceptionally rare in the European evaluation literature during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first articles on evaluation standards to appear in the European…

This article presents four projects geared towards providing the community of EAD users with methods and tools to control the quality of archival finding aids, to extract metadata from them in Dublin Core and qualified Dublin Core for use in OAI-PMH repositories, and to publish them on the Web along with the digital images produced by digitization…

In both Britain and France, evaluation has been seen as one element of national strategies to internationalise higher education (HE), with the spread of evaluation indicating policy convergence. However, there are dangers in describing the cross-national adoption of evaluation as an instance of policy transfer in higher education. This article…

Although the IB (international baccalaureate) diploma has almost universal acceptance as a college-preparation standard for students studying in foreign countries, Germany and France are reluctant to accept this diploma for nationals studying in their own countries. The German state governments are particularly concerned about quality control and…

This article aims to study the design and the organization of auditing systems to develop environmental or quality assurance schemes at the farm level and the role that extension services could play in these processes. It starts by discussing the issue of combining auditing and advisory activities and developing auditing competences. Empirical…

An approach to quality in college instruction at a French technical institute, based on the industrial model of quality assurance, is outlined, and four separate initiatives are described. They include a group organized to implement the approach in a civil engineering department, undergraduate curriculum reform, redefinition of objectives in…

A model of quality assessment for higher education that incorporates both accountability (representing extrinsic values) and peer-review/collegiality (reflecting intrinsic values) is outlined. It is presented in both a historical context and the context of experiences with quality assessment in North America and Western Europe. (Author/MSE)