E-TRAIN Dissemination Conference - On 14 and 15 June 2012 ECA and ANECA organised the conference “Designing a European QA Expert: Prêt-à-porter vs Haute couture” in Madrid, Spain.
The conference main aim was to disseminate the results of the ECA project European Training of QA Experts (E-TRAIN). The training programmes for European QA experts and QA staff members were presented. The perspectives and project experiences of the trainers, trained experts and staff members were  shared with the audience as well. Also the main stakeholders’ organisations: ENQA, EUA, EURASHE and ESU were invited to present their perspectives on the experts training issues.
The discussion focused on the possible continuation of the E-TRAIN project. The participants agreed that training European QA experts is a natural consequence of the European Higher Education Area. It was also agreed that the training programme needs to be further developed in order to fit the purposes of various types of assessments.
During the conference other project results presented too. One of these results, the ECApedia, which brings together the knowledge for carrying out reviews, can be found here.
Another project outcome is the European Experts Exchange Database, which aims to share European experts among participating agencies so that they can participate in procedures in multiple countries. The experts database was discussed and enthusiastically welcomed by the participants.
The conference programme, presentations and photos can be found here.
For more information on the E-TRAIN project please visit the project page.

Call for contributions to special edition of ZFHE Journal on quality assurance in European higher education. The ‘Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung’ (ZFHE- Journal for Development of Higher Education Institutions) has launched a call for contributions for a special issue to be published in January 2013. The special issue will focus on the theme ‘In quality we trust? – investigating the impact of more than two decades of QA in European Higher Education’. Guest editors Oliver Vettori (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and Bernhard Kernegger (University of Applied Arts, Vienna) invite researchers, experts and practitioners to send in contributions on the effects and effectiveness of QA and related concepts, such as quality management or quality development.
To read the call in full, please visit the website. The deadline for contributions is 14 September 2012.

On this page you fill find the necessary information on the EURASHE Seminar on Seminar on the implementation of Internal (and External) Quality Assurance and of the ESG in HEIs organised on 27 – 28 September 2012 in Nicosia, Cyprus.
EURASHE is pleased to inform you that it will organise a ’Seminar on the implementation of Internal (and External) Quality Assurance and of the ESG in HEIs’ on 27 and 28 September 2012 in Nicosia, Cyprus.
This event is organised in cooperation with the European University Cyprus, and the Open University of Cyprus, both EURASHE members. Moreover it will take place under the Auspices of the Cyprus Presidency of the European Union.
The objective of the seminar is to train individuals responsible for the management/coordination of internal QA at institutions (e.g. Quality Assurance managers, Quality Assurance coordinators, Quality Assurance administrators, Heads of Higher Education Institutions), so that after the completion of the seminar they would be able to organise and implement fully, efficiently and effectively internal Quality Assurance based on the ESG, preparing also in this way for the external Quality Assurance evaluation of their institutions.The seminar is built upon two themes, Internal QA processes & instruments for improvement; and Implementation of the ESG for QA in the institutions.
Further information will be available in the coming days. Stay tuned!
The rationale of the Seminar is available here!
Draft RATIONALE of the SEMINAR - Background and Purpose of the seminar
The European dimension of Quality Assurance starts from a guaranteed flexibility for governments to choose their system or ‘model ‘ of Quality Assurance, while observing the generic Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance, which are universally used in all European institutions of higher education conducting their own internal Quality Assurance and/or being subjected to external Quality Assurance by agencies, next to the latter’s use for their own quality purposes.
With the targeted attendants (from our members institutions, but also from a wider background of policy makers and Quality Assurance practitioners) we want to bring together a ‘community of practice’, which will be guided through the proceedings on the basis of a guide which has been developed by practitioners and policymakers, on the basis of their own expertise and relying on the feedback received through the extensive consultation among our membership and beyond this.
The ultimate objective with this hands-on seminar is to train individuals who are responsible for the management or coordination of internal Quality Assurance at institutions (e.g. Quality Assurance managers, Quality Assurance coordinators, Quality Assurance administrators, etc.), so that after the completion of the seminar they will have acquired the foundation for organizing and implement fully, efficiently and effectively internal Quality Assurance based on the ESG, preparing them in this way also for the external Quality Assurance evaluation of their institution.

The following is a guest post by Ellen Hazelkorn, vice president for research and enterprise and head of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the Dublin Institute of Technology. She is the author of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence (Palgrave Macmillan).
µThe university rankings debate is heating up – again. Hopefully, this time it will be different and with better outcomes for everyone. At a time when many nations are experiencing high levels of public and private debt and higher education is in great demand, university rankings have encouraged a preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of a handful of “world class” universities. This is having a profound–and perverse–effect on higher-education policy making, universities, and public opinion.
Rankings privilege the most resource-intensive and expensive universities on the assumption that such universities offer the best panacea for success in the global economy and world science. Thus, governments worry their institutions are not elite or selective enough, while university leaders say too much attention has been directed at widening participation. As a result, many governments are making the insidious connection between excellence and exclusiveness. They are busy reshaping their systems and institutions, their educational priorities and societal values to conform to indicators designed by others for commercial or other purposes. The public’s interest has become confused with self-interest.
There are, however, some small signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing. I have argued many times, in these columns and elsewhere, of the importance of focusing on the capacity of “the system as a whole” rather than simply on the performance of a few elite institutions. I have posed the policy challenge in terms of promoting a “world class system” rather than “world class universities.”
The Australian Review of Higher Education pinned its colors clearly to this mast, saying “we must address the rights of all citizens to share” the benefits of higher education. The Irish minister of education and skills said similarly in April of this year: “We need to maintain a clear focus on system performance overall rather than a narrower focus on individual institutional performance.”
A new ranking developed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research follows a path previously furrowed by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the Lisbon Council, and Jamil Salmi, former tertiary education coordinator of the World Bank. In their different ways, these initiatives are attempting to assess the quality, impact and benefit of the higher education system as a whole. In 2008, the Lisbon Council, an independent think tank based in Brussels, created the “University Systems Ranking. Citizens and Society in the Age of Knowledge,” and QS developed its “National System Strength Rankings”; both have been one-off ventures. The former measured the performance of 17 OECD countries against six criteria: inclusiveness, access, effectiveness, attractiveness, age-range, and responsiveness, while the QS ranking used broad four sets of indicators: system, access, flagship, and economic. Both sought to measure participation and government investment levels.
Salmi pointedly devised a benchmarking tool rather than a ranking in 2011. His aim was to evaluate how well a tertiary education system produces expected outcomes, and the key inputs, processes and enabling factors required to bring about the favorable outcomes. He used two broad indicators “system performance” (attainment; learning achievement; equity; research; knowledge and technology transfer; values, behavior, and attitudes), and “system health” (macro environment; leadership at the national level; governance and regulatory framework; quality assurance framework; financial resources and incentives; articulation and information mechanisms; location; digital and telecommunications infrastructure).
The new “U21 Ranking of National Higher Education System,” is more ambitious than any of these models. It has 20 criteria grouped under four main headings, each weighted differently in the final aggregate score:
•    Resources, 25 percent (investment by government and private sector on teaching and research);
•    Output, 40 percent (research and its impact, and ability of system to produce an educated workforce which meets labor market needs);
•    Connectivity, 10 percent  (international students and proportion of articles co-authored with international collaborators);
•    Environment, 25 percent (government policy and regulation, institutional and socio-economic diversity and participation opportunities).
It hopes to overcome problems of insufficient data in future editions; this should lead to more countries being included rather than the initial forty-eight. With the exception of Salmi, these initiatives are rankings rather than benchmarking. What’s the difference and does it matter? Benchmarking uses comparison as a strategic tool, helping governments, university leaders, and others to systematically compare practice and performance with peer institutions or countries. It can also be used as a diagnostic tool underpinning a program of continuous improvement. In contrast, rankings measure higher-education quality through quantification; by aggregating the scores and ranking them sequentially, it establishes a hierarchy of performance.
System-ranking is certainly better than concentrating on individual institutions, but it still reduces quality and excellence to a single digit, and de-contextualizes national circumstances. We still don’t have sufficient understanding of how these different factors work over time to improve the student experience or overall quality, or what policy choices work best in different circumstances.
What are we trying to accomplish? I’ve defined the goal as “making the system world-class”, with the following characteristics.
•    Open and competitive education, offering the widest chance to the broadest number of students;
•    Coherent portfolio of horizontally differentiated high-performing and actively engaged institutions – providing a breadth of educational, research, and student experiences;
•    Developing knowledge and skills that citizens need to contribute to society throughout their lives, while attracting international talent;
•    Graduates able to succeed in the labor market, fuel and sustain personal, social and economic development, and underpin civil society; and
•    Operating successfully in the global market, international in perspective, and responsive to change.
Without a doubt, it is important that governments and the public can compare national performance.  These initiatives are focusing our attention on the capacity of the higher-education system to educate all students and deliver benefits to the whole of society–in other words, to provide a total quality experience. They are a step in the right direction.

This conference will disseminate the results of the E-TRAIN project, which has developed a "train the trainers workshop" for agencies and a knowledge base for experts and QA staff. It is aimed at quality assurance experts, agencies and policy makers, to share procedures and good practice in trainings. For more information, visit the ECA website.
The number of experts participating in QA procedures in other countries than their own is increasing. ECA contributes to this positive development by organising trainings for these experts and setting up a pool of European experts. The E-TRAIN project has started these initiatives. In addition, a train the trainers workshop for agencies and a knowledge base for experts and QA staff have been developed. It is now time to disseminate these results to a wider audience.
Are you an expert or do you want to become an expert in QA procedures in other countries? Are you from an agency interested in good practices in trainings or in training and sharing European experts? Or are you a QA policy maker from an institution, association or government organisation? In all these cases this conference will probably be useful for you and you are cordially invited to participate. You can find the draft programme, logistical information and the registration facility in the menu at the left of this page.
See also The Website of the European Consortium for Accreditation in higher education (ECA).

Inspired by EUA’s Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP), this project was conceived by EUA and the Association of African Universities (AAU) as a means to enhance bi-regional understanding of quality assurance approaches, and specifically test the IEP methodology – a programme that has run for 18 years in Europe – on five very different African universities. Both universities and experts who participated in the evaluations (between September 2011 and March 2012) were overwhelmingly positive about the process. All five universities agreed that what rendered the evaluation unique was its non-punitive quality, and the fact that the visits and evaluation reports by the experts were highly constructive, pinpointing areas where the university could make real and tangible changes and improvements. Furthermore, the IEP methodology is flexible and dynamic enough to accommodate universities of all different shapes, sizes and missions.
The workshop participants endorsed the future continuation of an IEP-like programme in Africa and believed that AAU should lead this process, in conjunction with university organisations of the regional communities such as the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), the Higher Education Quality Management Initiative for Southern Africa (HEQMISA) and the Conseil Africain et Malgache pour l’Enseignement Supérieur (CAMES). Various future funding models were discussed, and it was stressed that EUA and AAU should continue to promote dialogue on quality assurance between universities of the two regions.
The final report on recommendations of the QA Connect project will be presented in Addis Ababa from 21 to 22 June 2012, targeting the donor community and African university leadership. More information will be posted on this event shortly. Europe-Africa Quality Connect is a two-year Erasmus Mundus Action 3 project implemented by EUA, AAU, University of Aveiro and the Irish-Africa Quality Board (IUQB). It is a follow-up to the project ‘Access to Success’ and the White Paper it produced on Africa-Europe higher education partnership for development in 2010. To find out more about the project, please visit the project website.

Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do, a selection of papers from the 6th european Quality assurance forum 17-19 november 2011 hosted by the university of antwerp and artesis university College antwerp, Belgium. Edited by: Lucien Bollaert, Fiona Crozier, Josep Grifoll , Áine Hyland, Tia Loukkola, Barbara Michalk, Allan Päll, Fernando Miguel Galán Palomares and Bjørn stensaker. Download Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do (6th EQAF).
III. Concluding remarks
Discussing ‘quality’ and ‘trust’: an analysis of the EQAF 2011 contributions
By Heinz Lechleiter (Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, former Director of Quality (2005-2010), Dublin City University, Ireland).
Introduction
The following essay is based on an examination of the abstracts submitted and accepted for the European Quality Assurance Forum 2011 in Antwerp. The bulk of the material presented here was prepared before the EQAF 2011. However, some elements of the papers, workshops, plenary sessions and discussions at the Forum have been incorporated. The essay is a written version of a workshop given at the Forum but the original intention was to present a conference preview to the diverse group of participants (students, institutions, agencies, government and industry representatives, and others) with the aim of creating an overview, of positioning all contributions in the overall context of the Forum, and of highlighting areas for discussion that emerge from the analysis.
Abstracts are an interesting text form. They select, simplify and condense highly complex realities and in doing that include certain aspects of these realities and exclude others, highlight certain aspects and the background of others (cf. Fairclough, 2005, pp. 10). Conference abstracts serve two further purposes: one is “to convince the reviewers that the associated paper should be accepted for presentation at the conference” (Martin-Martin, 2005, p. 6) and the other is to ‘sell’ the paper or workshop described in the abstract to the conference participants and to entice them to attend the corresponding session. For these reasons, the combined abstracts are likely to make up a body of text that captures the current state of development and thinking in the area of quality in higher education.
In the analysis, I seek to show what picture emerges as a result of the necessary simplifications and reductions in the abstracts, point to what is being highlighted, try to reveal what is side-lined, and attempt to crystallise these aspects into points of discussion that may help to advance the debate. It should be noted that some of the Points of Discussion (PoD) are triggered by findings but have been extended to take the wider context into consideration.
The methods used for the analysis were taken from corpus linguistics, text linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Frequency lists and concordances (i.e. clusters of words in their context) were produced by a software application called WordSmith. The abstracts were treated as one text in order to establish emerging patterns but individual abstracts could be traced when necessary. The analysis was carried out in a number of stages which are roughly reflected in the following sections, each leading into a PoD.
Analysis
First, a simple overview of word frequency was created. Overall, there are 29 abstracts, 24 of these for papers and 5 for workshops. Together they contain 5080 words (tokens), of which 1288 are different words (types). As is always the case, function words such as ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘in’ and ‘to’ top the list by a wide margin; these words may appear negligible but they do contain interesting information and I will come back to one of them (‘on’) in the last section. To begin with, however, we turn our attention to the content words. The most frequent by a wide margin is ‘quality’ in position 6 on the frequency list with 121 occurrences (written as 6/121), followed by ‘education’ (9/60), ‘assurance’ (10/56), ‘higher’ (15/45), and ‘students’ (17/37). In the comparison between ‘teaching’ (65/11) and ‘learning’ (39/18) the latter clearly wins out creating the impression that the shift from an input to an output perspective in higher education is well under way, with all that entails for the academic community (cf. PoD 2). The abstracts mention nearly fi ve times as many ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’ (9) as ‘solutions’ (2); remarkably, both mentions of ‘solutions’ occur in student contributions.
The Forum title Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do delivers the cue for the next step in the analysis. It puts the words ‘quality’, ‘trust’ and ‘we’ centre-stage and the focus of attention will be on each of them in turn.
It is one of the fundamental principles of text linguistics that words (expressions, grammatical features etc.) can never be looked at in isolation as it is their context and the situation that invests them with their meaning. Therefore we will try to get to know the term ‘quality’ by the company it keeps. In the EQAF 2011 abstracts the word ‘quality’ is combined with ‘assurance’ 55 times. All other combinations are much less frequent; they are with ‘management’ (7); ‘enhancement’, ‘process(es)’, ‘system(s)’ (4 each), and with ‘evaluation’ (3). Two absences need to be noted: neither ‘quality improvement’ (although there is one occurrence of ‘improvement of quality’) nor ‘quality culture’ feature in the abstracts. Taking into consideration that in the conference announcement a direct connection was made between ‘improvement’ and ‘trust’ the absence of the compound ‘quality improvement’ seems to contain a story.
Staying with ‘quality’ but changing the perspective, the next question asked of the abstracts was: the quality of what? There are ten combinations of ‘quality of’. Four of them are single instances of ‘services’, ‘structures’, ‘student experience’ and ‘implemented changes’. The other six can be grouped under the heading of ‘education’ (including ‘teaching’ and ‘course planning’), confi rming the close connection between education and quality. Taken together with the change of emphasis from ‘teaching’ to ‘learning’, from subject-specifi c knowledge to transferable skills, from directed to autonomous learning, a tendency emerges that has consequences both for the role of academics and students. In the discussions at the Forum the possibility of a devaluation of the teaching role was mentioned. The change to a learning focus gives the students a proactive role in the learning process, but how can their role in relation to education be described without reverting to the passive voice?
Next under the linguistic microscope is the term ‘trust’. There are 25 occurrences of the word in all the abstracts, all of them as nouns (as in ‘the trust’, as opposed to ‘we trust’), and with a very uneven distribution. ‘Trust’ appears in only four of the 24 papers (with nine mentions in one paper), whereas it is used in three of the fi ve analysed workshop abstracts. This indicates perhaps not surprisingly, that the workshops are more closely related to the Forum title than the papers. However, it is not only how often but in what way the term ‘trust’ is used that has some revelatory power. It has to do with the presence or absence of trust.
There is a relatively restricted number of words (predominantly verbs) the noun ‘trust’ can be combined with. The words combined with ‘trust’ in the abstracts can be divided into four subgroups. One group has to do with the fostering of existing trust (strengthen, assure, foster, contribute to), another with the creation of trust where it was not previously present (achieve, create, build, establish). All of these verbs can also be easily combined with the term ‘quality’ and have frequently been used in this way. There are two more groups, however, used in combination with ‘trust’ that have to do with loss of trust (reinstate, re-establish, regain; loss) and an outright opposite or antonym (distrust, mistrust; suspiciousness). It is my contention that one would be hard pressed to fi nd examples for instances speaking about the regaining of quality in any of the many institutional or other reports that have been published. Where antonyms are concerned, they can often be helpful in clarifying issues (for example clarifying the meaning of ‘old’ by supplying one of its antonyms ‘new’, ‘young’, or ‘modern’).
Conclusion
It has been the aim of this analysis and interpretation of the conference abstracts to create an overview of the European Quality Assurance Forum 2011 and to enable contributors to the Forum and other interested groups and individuals to survey and map the areas of interest, but also the lesser explored areas, in quality. The analysis has yielded a set of questions that will hopefully advance discussions in the future and will contribute to the development of a quality culture in higher education in Europe and further afield.
Although by no means exhaustive, the analysis is indicative of the potential that the application of a linguistic approach can have in the framework of discussions about quality in higher education and, indeed, elsewhere. Treating the conference abstracts as a valuable resource, it can act both as a mirror, enabling self-refl ection, and as a window, enabling views from the inside out, and from the outside into the world of quality in higher education.
References
Collins Cobuild, 1990, English Grammar, (Collins, London and Glasgow).
Fairclough, N., 2005, Critical discourse analysis, Marges Linguistiques, 9, pp. 76-94.
Johnson, M., 1989, The body in the mind. The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 1980, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Martin-Martin, P., 2005, The Rhetoric of the Abstract in English and Spanish Scientific Discourse: A Cross-Cultural Genre-Analytic Approach, (Bern, Peter Lang).
Maslow, A.H., 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370-96.
Download Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do (6th EQAF).
See also 7th European Quality Assurance Forum - Tallinn, 6th European Quality Assurance Forum - Antwerp, 5th European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) - Lyon.