QUALITYWATCH: Croatian Higher Education Quality Watchdog

PROJECT CONSORTIUM:

Association “MI” / Centre for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights – Osijek / Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka / Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar / Association for Higher Education Development “Universitas”

SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT :

The QUALITYWATCH project is based on the assumption that all public information must be published on the Internet, or on the web sites of the institutions responsible for this information. However, sometimes the publication process on the Internet is not enough: in the case of quality assurance in higher education, a large part of the documents are published on one of the websites of the relevant institutions. However, the question is how easily these documents are accessible, understandable and legible for interested individuals. For example, information on the quality of a particular university of higher education is of interest to a student who is trying to decide about which college to enroll, a student who wants a master’s degree because he primarily wants to engage in research work, a parent or a career counselor who wants to help his child or student decide which institution to choose. Can they easily and quickly come across a very complex system of quality assurance and hundreds of pages of professional documents that arise as a result of its functioning?

For this reason, the main objective of the QUALITYWATCH project is to increase the visibility of public policies in quality assurance in higher education and to increase access to already existing results of evaluation of the quality of higher education institutions.

MAIN OBJECTIVE:

Overall objective of this project is to increase the transparency of public policy decisions regarding the upholding of quality standards in higher education (HE) and increase public access to results of assessments and evaluations of the quality at HE institutions.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

• Build the capacity of CSOs for active advocacy of transparent and accountable implementation of quality assurance (QA) mechanisms in HE
• Develop mechanisms for monitoring public policy decisions related to QA in HE
• Advocate for wider public access to all available information on quality in HE

MAIN RESULTS OF THE PROJECT:

• More than 100 people (employees of civil society organizations, higher education institutions, state administration bodies, etc.) are educated about the procedures for monitoring and analyzing quality assurance procedures in higher education through 3 expert workshops
• Established criteria for monitoring and analyzing the transparency of quality assurance procedures
• 3 county reports on transparency of quality assurance procedures (for the City of Zagreb, Osijek-Baranja and Split-Dalmatia County) have been drafted
• Created detailed and long-term policy recommendations to improve the transparency of internal and external quality assurance procedures in higher education
• A feasibility study to launch a national database for quality assurance and improvement in higher education to facilitate user-friendly access to the results of quality evaluation procedures in higher education for the wider public
• Increased awareness of key stakeholders at national and local level on the importance of quality assurance standards in higher education and the consistent and transparent implementation of these standards by public authorities and higher education institutions