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.