ShareAQU Catalunya participates in the 14th INQAAHE Biennial Forum in Bucharest
The agency, through its president and the head of the Agency's Internationalisation and Knowledge Generation Department, will be part of two workshops at the event, which is entitled: ‘Transforming Society: Social Responsibility through Quality Assurance of Tertiary Education’.
AQU Catalunya participates this week in the 14th Biennial Forum of the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE). The president of the Agency, Francesc Xavier Grau Vidal, and the head of the Internationalisation and Knowledge Generation Department, Anna Prades Nebot, attended the event, which was held in Bucharest and is entitled Transforming Society: Social Responsibility through Quality Assurance of Tertiary Education.
Prades took part in a design-thinking forum on the first day of the meeting, a teamwork approach in which participants leave the meeting with a prepared proposal. The aim is to integrate the components of efficiency, relevance and transformation into external quality assurance systems. AQU Catalunya used material from the Global Study, in which some 300 external quality assurance agencies and around 1,000 higher education institutions participated, to identify the main challenges facing internal quality assurance systems in this workshop, which was carried out by Prades in collaboration with Susanna Karakhanyan and Ariana de Vicenzi.
The second day of the forum will see AQU Catalunya taking part in a workshop with Eva Fernández de la Bastida, Head of Internationalisation and Projects at the Basque University System Quality Agency (UNIBASQ). The second workshop will have round tables in which between 20 and 30 participants will analyse actions carried out to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in the university system and, thus, be able to exchange experiences among all participants in order to maximise the opportunities to learn about best practices at a global level. Their framework defines axes of equity (gender, social class, territory, disability, etc.), agents (governments, quality agencies, etc.), moments of intervention (access to higher education, progress and results or exit, etc.), and dimensions of intervention (which correspond to the evaluation guides: training profile, student access, teaching staff, teaching-learning processes, etc.).
INQAAHE is an international association of more than 300 organisations working in quality assurance in higher education, most of them quality assurance agencies. AQU Catalunya has been a member since 1998. Currently, the head of the Internationalisation and Knowledge Generation Department at AQU Catalunya, Anna Prades Nebot, is a member of the INQAAHE Board of Directors.