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Success Critical Factors For Implementing Quality Systems In European Higher Education
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Tovar, Edmundo Carina, Paola Castillo, Karen |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | Quality assurance in higher education is by no means only a European concern. All over the world there is an increasing interest in quality and standards, reflecting both the rapid growth of higher education and its cost to the public and the private purse. The EHEA with its 40 states is characterised by its diversity of political systems, higher education systems, sociocultural and educational traditions, languages, aspirations and expectations. In the light of this diversity and variety, technical universities set their faces to develop their internal quality assurance systems according not only to the European standards and the guidelines, but also focusing more on what should be done rather than how it should be achieved as well as to different factors and sources. Some of the schools of the Technical University of Madrid, along with other European universities, are in the initial stage of their Quality Assurance System implementation, awaiting the positive verification of the Spanish Quality Agency. This paper presents the results of a study with the purpose of reuse the experience of implementing the quality processes models to the schools of this university without a Quality Assurance System. As processes models contribute to the enhancement of overall quality for higher education and enable successive progress towards the higher levels we have proposed a generic Maturity Model that is tuned to the most important key processes. Through several techniques, such as focus groups and surveys, success critical factors that are common to all the university are identified. Lessons learned allow the less mature schools to take an easier way to design new and more efficient processes. 1. Quality in the context of European Higher Education The issue of quality assurance has risen very high on the Bologna agenda and is seen now as one of the key instruments to promote the attractiveness of European higher education. It was made clear that when defining common criteria and methodologies in European Higher Education it is necessary to take into account the diversity of the various systems and traditions that will go into the construction of a comparable framework. As discussed at the Graz Convention (May 2003) 1, among the policy goals for an appropriate European QA dimension are: • Achieve greater compatibility while managing diversity of QA procedures. There is a great diversity of national procedures in Europe that need to be accepted as this diversity reflects specific national circumstances that each national QA framework tries to address. Upholding a widely shared set of principles in the QA area would ensure compatibility while minimizing intrusiveness in national frameworks. • Achieve trust: It is evident from discussions with various key actors, that some believe that trust across Europe can be achieved only if all QA agencies follow similar procedures and guidelines. In other words, trust is based on professionalism, grounded in a set of standards. P ge 14093.2 • Preserve and extend institutional autonomy while meeting the demands for accountability: It is essential that the development of a European QA dimension accompanies and extends institutional autonomy in order to ensure that QA is not merely window-dressing and a compliance exercise. The Berlin Communiqué acknowledges the central role that institutions must play in this respect. Quality assurance systems need to be flexible and embrace this diversity in order to ensure that higher education serves society effectively. In a further step forward, the establishment of networks of assessing entities was sponsored by the European Commission in exercise of its competence in respect to promoting the European dimension and incorporating added value to Member States' initiatives. The supreme such entity is the ENQA (ENQA’s General Assembly confirmed on 4 November 2004 the change of the former European Network into the European Association) which was recognized by the conference of ministers at Berlin in September 2003 as the preferred interlocutor in matters of quality assurance in the European Convergence process. The ENQA has played a crucial role in the implantation of institutional assessment as part of the activity of Higher Edcuation Institution (HEI), and as part of the national strategies of European States. ENQA through its members, to develop an agreed set of standards, procedures and guidelines on quality assurance and to explore ways of ensuring an adequate peer review system for quality assurance and/or accreditation agencies or bodies 2 . The standards and guidelines were designed to be applicable to all HEI and quality assurance agencies in Europe, irrespective of their structure, function and size, or the national system in which they are located. In Spain, the Agency ANECA (Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de Calidad y Acreditación: Nacional Agency for Quality Evaluation and Accreditation), member of ENQA, has adapted the ENQA guidelines to the Spanish context and has published a document 3 with a set of guidelines for the systems of internal quality guarantee within HEI. 2. Maturity as an approach towards Excellence. Many European universities face the designing of these kinds of systems from a perspective of continuous improvement towards excellence, i.e. to reach a high degree of maturity. This paper presents an approach based on "Maturity models" used to achieve the goal of reusing the experiences of the pioneer Engineering Schools of the same technical university to improve the processes they share and take that knowledge and apply it to other Schools. Maturity can be understood as the culmination point of a growth and development process that is obtained through the integration of distinct qualities. From the viewpoint of an organization, a maturity model offers a conceptual approach to improve the management process in an orderly, referenced, evaluated and controlled way. Defining process maturity refers to expounding the development level they are in. A maturity model allows one to determine a series of rules to evaluate the maturity level for each process and establish improvement points. Maturity models provide organizations with useful tools for auto evaluation and pondering upon the past, present and future goals. 4 Organizations increasingly recognize the importance of quality management processes for business success. P ge 14093.3 2.a Maturity Models for Organizations. Philip Crosby is considered a pioneer in the concept of maturity in the quality field. In his book “Quality is Free”5 Crosby describes a Maturity Grid that consists of five stages and six management measurements or attributes that are the experience relationships that should be analyzed in order to complete the matrix. Table 1 provides a summary description for the five Stages for Crosby’s Maturity Grid. Table 1: Crosby’s Quality Management Maturity Stages |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://peer.asee.org/success-critical-factors-for-implementing-quality-systems-in-european-higher-education.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
