The quality assurance agencies AQU Catalunya, A3ES (Portugal), NOKUT (Norway) and QQI (Ireland) today organised an interesting international seminar on the future of university quality assurance in Europe. The Portuguese agency has presented a comparative study of the results obtained by European agencies in the evaluations that have taken place between 2015 and 2020 to accredit their compliance with European standards (ESG), showing the discrepancies between the technical judgments of ENQA and the European EQAR Register.
This study has been the subject of several authoritative comments: that of Douglas Blackstock, President of ENQA, pointing out that following the very recent reform of ENQA's Statutes, there will no longer be this kind of "double examination" by ENQA and EQAR. ENQA will continue to be the reference and most prestigious entity for conducting the evaluations of European agencies, but will leave the final judgement on ESG compliance to EQAR. This will allow ENQA to focus its strategy on the values of enhancement, diversity and innovation in university quality. Colin Tück, Director of ENQA, as well as former ENQA Presidents Padraigh Walsh, underlined the functional differences between ENQA and EQAR that would explain and make not only bearable but even timely and enriching the difference in optics between the two bodies.
In the second part of the webinar, Bjorn Stensaker, Director of LINK, the academic innovation centre of the University of Oslo, presented an interesting comparative study of the various innovations that six European agencies have been introducing from the point of view of the exercise of their activity. His presentation was the subject of a subsequent round table discussion moderated by Oystein Lund, from the Norwegian agency NOKUT and member of the ENQA Board, with the participation of representatives from the EUA (Tia Loukkola), EURASHE (Armando Pires), ESU (Jakub Grodecki) and the European Commission (Klara Engels-Perenyi).
The ACPUA has followed this event closely. Studies, presentations and the recording of the webinar will soon be available on the AQU Catalunya website.
