Building Cooperation culture with industry in institutional reviews: Case of Georgia

This was initiated amidst the reform of the external quality assurance system, aiming to bring it to compliance with ESG 2015. The first 6 years cycle of institutional evaluations with the renewed authorization standards was finalized in 2023. During these years, much experience has been amassed of recruitment, training and developing the long-standing cooperation with the industry representatives within the evaluations, with the industry representatives becoming the integral parts of the evaluations, yet many challenges remain. This paper explores the adopted practices and ongoing challenges of industry representatives’ involvement in authorization processes in Georgia. Having the main focus on the experience of industry representatives in the external quality assurance activities, the paper also examines the perceived impact of employer experts’ involvement in the authorization processes on the HEIs, as seen by the HEIs. This is especially important, due to the University-industry cooperation being generally weak in Georgia (European Commission 2018; Tabatadze 2023). The research data is based on the key policy documents as well as the interviews with the diverse sets of stakeholders, including the QA Agency representatives, the industry representative evaluators and the HEI representatives. The paper will be structured as follows: 1. Introduction 2. Overview of EQA of Higher Education in Georgia 3. The institutional evaluation cycle 2018-2023 (Including key statistics) 4. Methodology and research questions 5. Results 6. Conclusion.

This paper was presented at EQAF and reflects the views of the named authors only.

ISSN: 1375-3797

Building Cooperation culture with industry in institutional reviews: Case of Georgia

Lasha Macharashvili

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