25 years of the Institutional Evaluation Programme
18 September 2019
This year, (IEP) marks 25 years since its founding. During this time, the Programme has conducted 436 evaluations of higher education institutions in 50 countries worldwide.
Over the years, the core IEP mission has remained the same: offer voluntary evaluations that support institutions in developing their strategic leadership and capacity to manage change. While staying true to this philosophy, IEP has also broadened its approach to offer evaluations with a special focus and coordinated evaluations of all institutions in a country or region.
In 2019-2020, IEP will evaluate a further seven institutions. Five will have initial evaluations, while two will undergo follow-up evaluations in order to review the progress made.
In preparation for this, the IEP pool of experts gathered in Geneva on 19-20 September for IEP’s Annual Seminar. They received training for conducting the evaluations and worked to develop team dynamics. The pool also discussed the findings of a recent study that analysed the topics most frequently addressed by the recommendations in the evaluation reports. Those topics include governance and decision-making, followed by teaching and learning, and research. The findings suggest some convergence in the areas in which the evaluated institutions face challenges or are advised to make changes. The most prominent of these are strategy development, implementing the policies of the Bologna Process, and stakeholder collaboration.
IEP is a quality assurance agency, listed in the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR) and is a full member of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). Further information is available on the IEP website. Institutions interested in registering for an IEP evaluation can contact the secretariat at info@iep-qaa.org.
