Accessibility Tools
The 13th European Quality Assurance Forum focused on how institutions and quality assurance agencies can build systems that encompass a broad range of activities, including learning and teaching, research, governance and administration, and service to society.
As a tool for supporting the quality of higher education, quality assurance (QA) has in many European higher education systems focused largely on learning and teaching. However, as underlined in the introduction to the Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the EHEA (ESG), higher education institutions should have QA policies and processes that cover other institutional activities, and in parallel, external QA is increasingly looking into these policies. This edition of EQAF will explore how institutions and QA agencies can build QA systems that encompass a broad range of activities, including learning and teaching, research, governance and administration, and service to society.
Through a mix of plenary and parallel sessions, the 2018 EQAF, entitled ‘Broadening the scope of QA’, combined presentations of current developments in QA with discussions on research, policy and practice that took place in paper sessions and workshops.
Each year EQAF provided a platform for discussion, professional development and exchange of experiences among the main stakeholders in QA. Specifically, the Forum was of interest to rectors and vice-rectors responsible for QA, QA officers in higher education institutions, students, QA agency staff and researchers working on higher education or the QA field.
For updates follow @EQAF on Twitter.
Consult the full papers, or have a look at more photos of the forum.
About WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business)
The institution that would later become today’s WU was founded over 100 years ago on 1 October 1898. Now WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) is a modern public university committed to excellence in research and research-led teaching.
The mission WU has defined for itself goes well beyond providing a high-qualityCampus2 education for the university’s over 22,000 students. WU’s roughly 2,100 employees are working continuously to further improve teaching and research quality and campus life in all relevant areas. One of the goals WU has set itself is to achieve and maintain a place among the worlds’ leading institutions of higher education. WU is working to strengthen its global profile by offering a range of English-taught Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes and by emphasising internationalisation in its research activities. WU’s triple accreditation by EQUIS, AACSB, and AMBA – the three foremost international accreditations for business and economics universities – is a testimonial of WU’s high quality standards. WU’s excellent international reputation is reflected in its student population: roughly one in four students on campus has come to study at WU from abroad.
WU’s campus, which was officially opened in 2013, is located in Vienna’s second district and consists of six building complexes. Campus WU boasts modern auditoriums with state-of-the-art equipment, Austria’s largest business and economics library, plenty of workstations for independent study, and generously sized PC labs. The buildings on Campus WU take up a total built-up area of 35,000 m². Apart from its impressive architecture, Campus WU also boasts a range of attractive publicly accessible grounds that encourage students, staff, and visitors to explore the area and enjoy its unique atmosphere. Campus WU provides meeting places, event locations as well as open spaces – a completely new neighborhood within Vienna’s second district has emerged.
Photo ©2014 BOANET.AT
About AQ Austria
The Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Austria (AQ Austria) is the national independent quality assurance agency for the Austrian higher education system. It was founded in 2011 by a merger of three former existing Austrian agencies.
According to its legal mandate, AQ Austria is responsible for the accreditation of higher education institutions and their programmes (private universities and universities of applied sciences), audits of the internal quality management systems (public universities and universities of applied sciences) consultancy to HEI and thematic analyses.
AQ Austria has a strong international profile and performs quality assurance activities also outside the country, notably in the German speaking countries and Southeast and Eastern Europe. Being member of ENQA and also EUA and EURASHE, the agency participates actively in international projects in order to develop quality assurance approaches further.
© Pascal Riesinger/PhotoArt
