Joint quality initiative

Report of a short meeting of the working group January 22, 2002, at the Madrid Conference "Transparency for European Higher Education".

1.  International conference 12/13 March

* The title of the conference will be: Working on the European Dimension of Quality

International Conference on Accreditation and Quality Assurance
in Higher Education

* A letter of invitation will be sent by the two ministers of the Netherlands and Flanders jointly to the ministers involved in the Bologna declaration/Prague communiqué.

The letter mentions: "We welcome participants from countries that are party to the Bologna Declaration, including representatives of relevant ministries, higher education institutions and their associations active in transnational accreditation or quality assurance, as well as student organisations."

2. Web-site

The web-site www.jointquality.org is in the air. Domains net, com, info and nl are also claimed and transfer automatically to the org domain.

The producer was chosen for reasons of quick loading web-sites. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

3. EU-Commission - Socrates budget for joint quality.

About the suggestions of the EU-Commission to subsidize joint quality actions with Socrates programme budget we were informed during the Madrid conference that ENQA will be contracted by the Commission to operationalize this in co-operation with the tuning project.

4. Dublin workshop 15th February.

The preparation and preparatory documents were discussed.

The workshop is geared to comparing existing descriptors and discuss commonness amongst parties that use the descriptors. Nick Harris will mail the questionnaire and request to fill it in and return it to him. The answers will be analysed and mailed back to participants prior to the workshop, to enable a fruitful workshop.

Participants  are requested to fill in the questionnaire and mail it to Nick Harris well in advance (n.harris@qaa.ac.uk).

Brian Maguire  (bmaguire@nqai.ie) will do a registration, just to know how many will be present. Travel and hotel costs have to taken care of by participants. There is a hotel recommended and please let Brian know if you are in Dublin Thursday night.

5. Growth of the network

Austria Fachhochshulrat and Norway ministry of Education showed interest in the joint quality initiative. Austrian  Fachhochshulrat is advised to be in touch with the Austrian ministry of Education about this.

The March conference is meant to present the work of the initiative and open up the possibility to widen the network.

The Dublin workshop is geared to comparison of existing descriptors for bachelor and master programmes.

m.e.leegwater@minocw.nl

25-01-02