Quality assurance at European Level
The program was an Erasmus Mundus project and as such adopted the majority of the EU QA standards and procedures.
Compliance with European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes (EQAR)
The local quality assurance procedures also comply with the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes although no EQAR-registered quality assurance agency has been selected by the EMSE Consortium because not all countries of the partners allow this.
Quality assurance actions at consortium level
The EMSE Consortium has put in place the following actions for quality assurance at consortium level:
1) Student’s representative in the Joint Board (elected on October 19th, 2016). Election every two years.
2) A general e-mail account (emse-secretariat@unibz.it) to contact the coordination of the consortium
3) In each Country of the EMSE Programme, the course undergoes periodical quality accreditation see below),
4) An annual students’ questionnaire of EMSE (the last one on September 2017),
5) The January annual meetings between the Task Force and Joint Board
b) A students’ workshop during the Summer School, and
6) Local academic council at each partner.
Quality assurance actions at partner level
For aspects, like course accreditation and evaluation, level of the students’ services, or
processes for teaching staff recruitment, each partner has its own quality assurance program in place that complies national regulations. The EMSE quality assurance procedures are in line with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) (2015).
UNIBZ -Italy. At UNIBZ the periodical accreditation and evaluation is performed by ANVUR through the AVA system that is designed on few recent Ministerial Decrees in compliance with the ESG 2015 guidelines (DM 987 of 12 December 2016 and DM 60 of 08/02/2017, DM 935 of 29 November 2017, Decree 34280 of 4 December 2017 for the accreditation courses and subsequent rectification Decree 34377 of 5 December 2017) on the system of self-assessment, evaluation,
initial and periodic accreditation of university offices and courses of study. In Italy, no HEI can choose an EQA Registered agency and the evaluation is based on Institutional and programme accreditation. From 2018, Italian HEIs undergo periodical evaluation according to the national guidelines66 compliant with ESG. In May 2018, the program passed with success its first periodic evaluation of the University Quality Assurance committeee (Nucleo di Valutazione). The report of the evaluation (in Italian) is available here: Rapporto di audizione_2018-05-18_LM_Emse
More information on the quality assurance process at unibz are available at the page of the Presidio di Qualità.
UPM, Spain – Spanish higher education institutions cannot choose an EQAR-registered agency for their mandatory external quality assurance. The Spanish national EQAR-registered agency in charge of program verification of official degrees (ANECA in Spain), has verified on December 19th, 2016 the quality of the local Master program at UPM where the double degree is implemented upon, for the next four years.
OY, Finland. The university of Oulu quality assurance system was audited in autumn 2017 Evaluation news. The Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (FINEEC or Karvi in Finnish) was responsible for the auditing, and it is also a national EQAR-registered agency. The evaluation was conducted in English.
The University’s quality assurance system passed the audit and the University received a quality label as a token of that. (http://www.oulu.fi/university/quality).
The complete report which include all criteria’s (page:64-69) can be access here: report 2017
UKL, Germany. For Germany, the EQAR evaluation is allowed and from mid 2018 applications for program and system accreditation must be addressed to German Accreditation Council.