Road Map for Implementation of Institutional Assessment

ended

The Project will address one of the specific key commitments of the Bologna Process such as quality assurance in compliance with the ESG. The Bologna implementation report 2018 illustrates how successfully the ESG 2015 have been transposed into external quality assurance practice. Latvia is among those countries where a majority of the ESG elements are required or usually happen in practice. However, there are several elements which are not integrated into typical external quality assurance processes. In these systems, while the model for external quality assurance may consider that certain elements need not be directly addressed in external quality assurance processes, it is also possible that improvements could be made to integrate all main aspects of the ESG 2015. The main objective of the Project is to improve the quality assurance system in Latvia and introduce a regular institutional accreditation as the main quality assurance procedure that will decrease the current overlap among the different quality assurance procedures and reduce the administrative burden as well as the costs of assessment procedures. The main outcome of the Project is enhancement-led quality assurance system, by introducing regular institutional assessment that will increase the trust in higher education institutions as the providers of quality education, strengthen the internal mechanisms of the institutions and facilitate a quality culture. In order to reach the objective of the Project, the quality assurance systems and legislative frameworks of several EHEA countries will be analysed for developing a concept on the transition to the regular institutional assessment; seminars and peer-learning activities will be organized in order to receive experts` advice; workshops for HEIs and other relevant stakeholders will be organized in order to get knowledge on the institutional assessment and its benefits for better understanding of external quality assessment procedures.