Critical success factors for implementing quality systems in european higher education

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. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.

Año de publicación:

2009

Keywords:

Fuente:

scopus