01 September 2011 | Report

Examining Quality Culture Part II: Processes and Tools - Participation, Ownership and Bureaucracy

Andrée Sursock

The project "Examining Quality Culture in Higher Education Institutions" (EQC) aimed to provide an overview of the internal quality assurance processes in place within higher education institutions across Europe and tackled the question of how they have responded to Part 1 of the European Standards and Guidelines for quality assurance (ESGs).


The EQC project was designed in two phases. In the first phase, a survey questionnaire addressed the seven areas included in Part 1 of the ESGs. A total of 222 institutions from 36 countries across Europe responded and the results were analysed and presented in a report entitled Examining Quality Culture – Part I (Loukkola and Zhang 2010). The report, published in 2010, showed that great progress had been made in the institutions in developing internal quality mechanisms.

In a second phase, 59 phone interviews were conducted with ten universities selected from the sample that responded to the survey questionnaire. The goal of the interviews was to identify the extent to which quality assurance tools and processes contributed to building a quality culture in institutions. This report is a presentation and analysis of these interviews. It is specifically focused on establishing the relationship
between the formal quality assurance processes and quality culture and on illustrating – through concrete examples – good and weak practices in this area.

9789078997290
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