Quality assurance should promote change and drive it forward
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BRUSSELS - It is essential to strengthen trust and to remove the obstacles that students face in quality assurance activities in order to enhance their participation. Students need to be involved at every stage in quality assurance and decision-making processes so that the quality of higher education can be improved.
Quality assurance activities should not be limited only to learning and teaching processes, as other factors may also influence the quality of higher education. Student-centred learning approaches should be adequately implemented by higher education institutions and public authorities should support that development.
Higher education institutions need to develop their communication and information channels to ensure that they provide the relevant information to students according to their expectations. In that respect, quality assurance needs to be transparent and accessible to the wider public. Further research is, however, required on how students' expectations are generated and how quality is conceptualised, especially in relation to external influences.
These are among the main outcomes of the Quest for Quality for Students' project (QUEST) that were presented at a final conference at Neth-ER in Brussels on 31 October. The QUEST project, co-funded by the European Commission, was officially launched in 2010. The team behind it has since then been working hard on the ambitious task of identifying student views' on the quality of higher education in order to develop a student-based concept for this issue.
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Students can affect the quality of their education
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BRUSSELS - Useful guidelines on how students can get involved and affect quality assurance and enhancement activities have been published by the European Students' Union (ESU) as part of the Quest for Quality for Students project (QUEST). This includes a student handbook on quality assurance and enhancement and a user driven Wiki-style website. Go to full article  
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ESU trains Moldovan students for quality assurance
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CHISINAU - Representatives of the European Students' Union (ESU) organised a training session on quality assurance of higher education for around seventy students in the Republic of Moldova from 27 September to 1 October. This session was organised as part of a three year project on the Development of Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Moldova (QUAEM), which is run by the University of Leipzig in Germany in collaboration with several partners, including ESU, and financed by the TEMPUS programme of the European Union. Go to full article
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Access to education a global priority at ESU
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MONTRÉAL - During the months of September and October, two events took place on opposite sides of the world with remarkable alignment between their outcomes and the sense of purpose in their participants. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, the third Asia Europe Education Workshop was organised around the theme "Beyond the Academic Benchmark - Societal Excellence in Higher Education" organised by the Asia-Europe Foundation. Shortly after this, in Montréal, Canada, the European Access Network organised the first World Congress on Access to Postsecondary Education. Go to full article
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Internship opportunities in Ethiopia and the USA
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BRUSSELS - In reply to the call for host organisations that the European Students' Union published this summer, two more institutions have expressed their interest in offering internship positions to students as part of implementing the SiS Catalyst project.
After fulfilling recommendations set by the evaluators and resubmitting improved proposals, the Salish Kootenai (Tribal) College in Montana, United States of America, and the Eco-Ethics International Union, in Ethiopia, will offer the opportunity to three more students to gain practical experience abroad and to work on topics related to social sciences. Go to full article
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Student centred learning assessed in a new ESU project
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BRUSSELS - On 16 and 17 October, the European Students' Union (ESU) hosted a kick-off meeting of a new project called Peer Assessment of Student Centred Learning in Higher Education Institutions in Europe, or PASCL for short. Go to full article
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