EQAR Newsletter - December 2018

News: Latest decisions Register Committee | DEQAR Update |
Members' Dialogue | Season's greetings

Latest decisions Register Committee

The 22^nd Register Committee (RC) was held in Brussels on 5-6 December. The Committee
admitted one new agency to the Register and approved one renewal application:

AIC - Academic Information Centre (Latvia)
NOKUT - Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (renewal application, NOKUT has been listed since 2014)

For more detailed information on the RC meeting, please view our news item.

See all QAAs listed on the Register

DEQAR Update

The Database for External Quality Assurance Results (DEQAR) continues to cover more and more agency records and reports. Not only DEQAR project partners, but also other EQAR registered agencies are busy uploading their reports. In October we unveiled an updated public user interface with both content- and design improvements, based on user feedback. You wil find:

Enhanced and up-to-date information on QA requirements in each EHEA country
Increased use of icons for easy viewing of report and agency status
Improved interlinking between the country, agency and institution records
More focused and easy-to-use search functionality

Twenty-two EQAR-registered agencies have already uploaded reports to DEQAR, and the system currently includes 5352 reports covering approximately 1000 Higher Education Institutions in over 40 countries. (See map for countries with high and low coverage.) We are aiming to have approximately 20,000 reports in the system by June 2019.

DEQAR has been presented at many higher education and QA-related events and will continue to be so during the coming months. Feel free to contact the EQAR Secretariat (info@eqar.eu) if you would like a database presentation at your event, tailor-made for your specific user-group.

In the meantime, now that the system contains a critical mass of reports we can begin the research part of the project. Keep an eye out for:

Data visualisation features providing greater context for reports.
Two pilot research studies based on DEQAR to be published by the University of Ghent in the second half of 2019.

We encourage everone to see DEQAR’s new interface at: https://www.deqar.eu and of course, we are always happy to receive feedback in our DEQAR User Survey.

EQAR Members’ Dialogue

The 2018 Members’ Dialogue was held in Berlin on 27-28 November, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Lively discussions were held following presentations on:

Realising the EHEA Goal of Automatic Recognition.
Taking Stock of the EHEA Key Commitments: compliance with the ESG and limitations found within EHEA national frameworks.
European policies and national agendas shaping our systems in higher education and QA systems in particular.
A retrospective on 10 years of EQAR.

Smaller, more intimate sessions evolved around recognition, DEQAR, the need for all QAAs in Europe to align their work to the ESG, student-run QA pools and case studies on both joint programmes and cross-border QA.

For more detailed information on the Members' Dialogue, please view our news item.
To view presentations and photos of the event.

Season's greetings

We wish you, your family and other loved ones, a holiday season filled with love and laughter and a dynamic, dazzling 2019. May you share meaningful moments and create lasting memories!

Another year passed, swiftly and satisfactory, and as the sayings go “time flies when you are having fun” and “the older you get the faster time goes”, so thus it goes for EQAR. Celebrating 10 years of EQAR this year, and overlooking all that EQAR has achieved in those ten years thanks to countless contributors, we can say that EQAR has matured and continues to do so. The Database of External Quality Assurance Results (DEQAR) is one good example of EQAR’s coming of age.

Now, as we come to the end of the year, we are looking forward to some downtime to restore our energy levels for 2019. We look forward to an exciting new year in which we can continue and deepen our cooperation.

Karl Dittrich (EQAR President)
Colin Tück, Annelies Traas, Melinda Szabo & Katie Mathe (EQAR Secretariat)

Please note that the EQAR office will be closed from 24 December 2018 until 2 January 2019.