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Butlletí

A bimonthly publication of AQU Catalunya

67

July 2013

EDITORIAL

AQU Catalunya: the means for improving Catalan universities

As I begin my work as President of the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU Catalunya) I would like to briefly express three things:

Firstly, my gratitude. I am very grateful to the Executive Council (Govern) of the Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya) for my appointment to this position, in particular to the Minister, Andreu Mas-Colell, and the Secretary for Universities and Research, Antoni Castellà. I am also grateful to the work done during the terms in office of the previous presidents, Antoni Serra Ramoneda and Joaquim Prats Cuevas. Together with the various directors (CEOs) that the Agency has had up until now – David Serrat, Gemma Rauret, Javier Barà and, currently, Josep A. Ferré – they have made the Agency into an institution that is widely esteemed both in the Catalan system of higher education and at international level. It is structures of this type that increasingly substantiate Catalonia's position and enhance its reputation.

The second thing is that, as I begin, I now have to learn. The Agency has skilled and experienced professionals with whom I have to find out what exactly they have done to produce what has been done up until now, together with what they think about the future. I am not here to give lessons, but to learn, to see and listen how the various instruments sound and how they are all organised and fit together as a whole. Only when I have become fully immersed in the internal workings of the institution will it be time to coordinate its movements and optimise the Agency's work.

AQU NEWS

ARTICLES

Towards a model for the quality assurance and enhancement of higher education specific to Catalonia?
Despite the difficulty of making predictions about the future within the scope of quality assurance and enhancement in higher education, three possible undercurrents at European scale are emerging: the first is a move in the direction of a greater European dimension in quality assurance systems; the second undercurrent may lead to a drastic reduction in the intensity of quality assurance; and third involves the proposal to transform national QA agencies into places of encounter for academic communities and stakeholders with an interest in the quality of higher education.
Josep Grifoll Saurí - Head of Quality Assessment department
Conclusions from the workshop "Reaccreditation of the teaching assessment handbooks used by public universities in Catalonia"
More than 80 people, including vice-rectors, academics, students and technical staff from the universities and the Agency came together at the headquarters of AQU Catalunya on 16 April to appraise the teaching assessment programme in Catalan universities and discuss the challenges facing the programme.
Editorial board - AQU Cataluny

OPINION

What is the purpose of the satisfaction survey of graduates in Catalonia?

Dolors Baena Tostado and Jordi Casanova Maturana
Agency for Policy and Quality, University of Barcelona

Within the context of the activities aimed at quality enhancement in the universities and, more particularly, programme monitoring, the compiling of information on students' thoughts and perceptions about their studies just at the point when they are graduating is a key element of great relevance in that it provides their personal point of view regarding their degree programmes as a whole, which is without doubt fundamental for enabling improvements to be made to study programmes.

In this regard, this article reports on one of the projects that, coordinated through AQU Catalunya, is being carried out by Catalan universities, namely, the design of the graduate satisfaction survey, coinciding with the first cohort of graduates from EHEA-compliant Bachelor programmes.

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