Events

The annual meetings of CEENQA were held this year on 11-12 May 2018 in Tirana at Tirana International Hotel. The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in Albania (ASCAL) generously hosted the event. On Friday evening, the congregation visited Durres. The participants could take part in a walking tour through Durres. There, the participants visited the Amphitheatre of Durres as well as the beach promenade. Afterwards, the participants had a fine dinner at the seafood restaurant ARTUR. On Saturday afternoon, following the General Assembly and lunch, a bus tour to Berat was offered to the participants. There the participants had the opportunity to visit Berat Fortress and the National Iconographic Museum “Onufri”.

Please find the minutes as well as the annexes (participants’ list, programme of the workshop, agenda of Board Meeting, agenda of General Assembly, presentation of projects, financial report 2017 and Treasurer’s report) here. If you want to have a few impressions of the annual meeting, please look at the pictures below.

This year, the CEENQA held its general assembly and workshop in Zagreb, kindly hosted by the Croatian quality assurance agency ASHE. The Workshop explored the  “WAYS FORWARD TO MAKE EXTERNAL QUALITY ASSURANCE A MORE EFFICIENT PROCESS ” with a number of higher education experts as speakers. The program can be seen here.

In the general assembly, Iring Wasser’s term as president of CEENQA ended and CEENQA members expressed their thanks to Dr. Wasser for his energetic leadership and the number of international projects he saw through or initiated during his office. Nora Skaburskiené was elected to the post. Two Board members, Ivan Leban and Martina Vidlakova, were re-elected for another two-year term and a new Board member, Duska Radmanovic, was elected. Christina Rozsnyai stepped down from the position of General Secretary and is succeeded by Marleen Roggan.

In addition, CEENQA accepting a new member, ANQA, from Armenia. A long-standing member, UC Poland, resigned from CEENQA as it ceased operations.

The program of the general assembly is available here.

The annual workshop and general assembly was in Krakow on 13-14 May 2016 at the late-14th-century building Collegium Maius of the Jagellonian University. The meeting marks the 15th anniversary of the official founding of the CEE Network, as the organization was called at the time, and which took place also in Krakow in 2001. Hosts of this meeting were the Polish University Accreditation Commission UAC and the Polish Accreditation Committee PKA. Following the workshop was a splendid dinner at Biała Różaand, in spite of the rain, a walking tour of the old market square. On Saturday afternoon, following the general assembly and lunch, participants joined a guided tour of Wavel Castle.

The workshop, with a welcome by Professor Andrzej Mania, vice-rector of the Jagellonian University, was titled “Quality Assurance of Transnational Higher Education”, a topic that has gained momentum leading up to and following the adaptation by the Ministers in Yerevan last May of the “European Approach to the Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes”. Speakers on the topic are Nora Skaburskiene, SKVC Lithuania (Presentation here); Achim Hopbach, AQ Austria (Presentation here); Fabrizio Trifiro, QAA UK (Presentation here); and Mark Frederiks, NVAO The Netherlands (Presentation here).

Resentative Olexandr Smyrnof from the soon-to-be-established accreditation committee of Ukraine was invited to the meeting. The program for the workshop is available here.

The highlights of the general assembly are

• the Latvian Quality Agency for Higher Education AIKA joining CEENQA as its 29th member
• the election of Dr. Achim Hopbach of AQ Austria and re-election of three Board members
• the adoption of a new staff-exchange scheme
• strengthened liaising with ENQA with Nora Skaburskiené joining Christina Rozsnyai on the Board of the Association
• revised application form based on “Common Values and Principles.”
• Additional information on CEENQA is available on the website www.ceenqa.org.

The Independent Agency for Accreditation and Rating (IAAR) joins CEENQA.
The CEENQA membership voted on 8 February 2016 to accept IAAR, Kazakhstan, as its 28th member. IAAR is the second quality assurance agency from Kazakhstan.

The 27-member Central and Eastern European Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education held its annual meeting on 22-23 May 2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The workshop and general assembly were hosted by the Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency in Higher Education (SQAA/NAKVIS), a CEENQA member.

The annual CEENQA meeting opened with welcoming words from Iring Wasser, CEENQA President. He was followed by the just appointed Slovenian Minister of Education, Science and Sport, Maja Makovec Brenčič, herself a Full Professor of International Business at Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana and a former president of the Council of Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education of Slovenia. Ivan Leban, host of the meeting, also welcomed the participants with a few words on his agency, SQAA.

The workshop theme was Impact of Quality Assurance and Accreditation, a topic widely acknowledged as timely, given that hardly any research into the topic exists. Professor Theodor Leiber from the German CEENQA member agency evalag presented the background and results of the Impact Analysis of Quality Assurance in Higher Education(IMPALA) project. Heli Mattisen, head of the Estonian Higher Education Quality Agency (EKKA) described a recent national project surveying the impact of quality assurance at higher education institutions. Blazhe Todorovski, representing the European Students’ Union (ESU) presented this organisation and projects dealing with quality assurance and its impact. Professor Ivan Leban, director of SQAA, as host of the event, introduced his presentation with some information on Slovenian higher education and went on to present ideas on quality assurance in relation to business and industry. Josep Grifoll from AQU Catalunya and a member of the ENQA working group on the impact of quality assurance presented the first results of the project.

The General Assembly of CEENQA was a business meeting of the network. Three Board member positions, including that of the president and the vice-president, were up for election. President Iring Wasser from ASIIN, Germany, was re-elected as Board member and President for a third and final two-year term. Vice-President Ivan Leban from SQAA, Slovenia, was also reconfirmed in his position, for a second two-year term. Martina Vidlakova from the Accreditation Commission of the Czech Republic was elected as a new Board member.

• running international projects where CEENQA is a partner – BIHTEK, ALIGN, BHQFHE with multiple partners in the Central and Eastern European region, and QUALITAS involving the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS) – were discussed.
• 2016 general assembly and workshop will celebrate the 15th anniversary of CEENQA, and return to Krakow, Poland, the location of its founding. The meetings will be hosted by the University Accreditation Commission of Poland (UAC) together with the Polish Accreditation Commission (PKA).

The presentations of the workshop can be accessed here: Leban final, Heli Mattisen, J Grifoll, T Leiber, Todorovski.

The Kosovo Accreditation Agency KAA has very kindly hosted this year’s CEENQA events in Pristina. A wonderful trip to the snowy caps of Šar Mountain and the Dinarides range, culminating in a delicious dinner in the historic town of Prizren, was heartily appreciated by all participants. To everyone’s regret, President Iring Wasser had to cancel his participation at the last minute for health reasons. Vice-President Alexander Kohler took over as chair with assistance from Board member and host Ferdije Zhushi Etemi.

The workshop on May 23 sought to explore “What Makes a Successful Quality Assurance Agency?”. Minister of Education, Science and Technology Rame Buja welcomed the participants, including guests Steve Bristow, a member of the KAA Board, the speakers Lukas Bischof of CHE Consult, Germany and André Govaert from KU Leuven, Belgium as well as CEENQA project manager Mila Zarkh, for whom this was the first CEENQA meeting. Mila Zarkh presented the procedure and preliminary results of the UNESCO/INQAAHE survey adapted to CEENQA on “Practices in External Quality Assurance”. She was followed by the presentations of Lukas Bischof, André Govaert and Ferdije Etemi.

May 24, the General Assembly discussed progress in the EU projects BIHTEK, on benchmarking in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and ALIGN, on aligning study programmes with qualification frameworks, in which CEENQA is a partner. The Romanian Agency ARACIS had also organised an EU-funded project hosting staff visits from two CEENQA agencies to study review methodology and accompany site visits for one week.

Four Board members had left their agencies and hence the CEENQA Board, so that new members, including the Vice-President and Treasurer, had to be elected at the General Assembly. The new Board members with two-year terms are

• Dhurata Bozo, APAAL Albania
• Cristina Ghitulica, ARACIS Romania
• Nora Skaburskiene, SKVC Lithuania
• Izabella Kwiatkowska-Sujka, PKA Poland – Treasurer

Continuing Board member Ivan Leban was elected Vice- President.

The 2015 meetings will be hosted by SQAA Slovenia, and in 2016 the two Polish CEENQA members would organize the event jointly, taking the occasion to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of the formal founding of the CEE Network in Krakow in 2001.

The presentations are accessible here: Nadejda Velișco, Basri Muja, Ferdije Etemie, André Govaert, Nora Skaburskiene, Mila Zarkh. The presentation by Lukas Bischof will be uploaded at a later date.