Quality and European Programme Design in Higher Education

Abstract

The relationship between internationalisation and quality in Higher Education has been taken for granted, debated, and closely linked together at the conceptual level. It is at the conceptual level where the connection between internationalisation and quality seems to be better recognized.The search for this link has already a significant history of studies and projects. This search is well documented in "Trends in quality assurance for European Higher Education" (Campbell and van der Wende, 2000). Furthermore, a number of conclusions can be considered of great interest as possible means to advance towards the development of the full potential of the link between quality and internationalisation.In this respect, the report further found that it was difficult to evaluate the contribution of internationalisation to the quality of education, that the quality of internationalisation itself was not monitored or assessed systematically and that groups and actors involved in each of the processes were often disconnected. "The fact that the quality of internationalisation activities is not assessed systematically was, in the past, due to weak meassures at programme and institutional level" (Campbell and van der Wende, 2000: 6). The fact that internationalisation is not fully covered by quality assurance procedures dealing primerily with the core functions of education and research was already recognized (van Damme, 1999) and is a daily experience of any conciencious actor in the internationalisation arena. Although conceptually linked, they may be seen as two if not conflicting at least unrelated targets with different territories, in the case of the quality bodies, normally their territory relates to the national, while what goes beyond the national has become very real and growing in strength and significance, and remains uncovered in a systematic manner. This has created important difficulties for the relevant development of cooperation and in particular for crucial actions such as international joint degrees.Following the conclusion that the quality of internationalisation activities lacks systematic quality assessment due, in part, to weak measures at programme and institutional level, two paths are clearly marked for development: institutional and programme levels.Institutional level is an obvious and clear route to follow and significant developments have been done along these lines. From the Salamanca Convention, this approach has marked the work of the EUA and the search for quality culture at the intitutional level is one of the lines of work of this Association. In the Bologna Seminar on quality assurance in Higher Education, André Sursock focused the attention on the capacity of quality assurance mechanisms to be used by universities themselves to steer internally the institution. This is further developped at the Graz Convention where it is considered essential that universities develop an internal quality culture to monitor all their activities and services in a way that is congruent with core academic va...

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