A paradigm shift in European Higher Education puts students’ competencies in the spotlight. Therefore, internal quality assurance (IQA) procedures are in demand, which structurally focus on the responsible enhancement of student competences. These methods should not end with accountability but should also take enhancing a student program in focus. Furthermore, evaluation research shows that (1) including different stakeholder perspectives in a QA procedure leads to a higher probability of using evaluation results and (2) a participative evaluation approach supports a quality culture that fosters individual and organizational learning.

In this workshop, the European Toolkit for Internal Quality Management in Competence-Based Higher Education (IQM-HE) will be presented. This Toolkit was developed within an EU funded Erasmus+ project by practitioners, researchers, and quality assurance agencies and -associations. It focuses on the characteristics addressed above and assists persons in charge of IQA in implementing a multi-perspective participative approach for (self)evaluating students’ competences and competence-based teaching and learning. It includes a wide range of hands-on materials like a handbook, information material for different stakeholder groups, ideas for workshops, questionnaire- and report templates, and a collection of ideas and measures for improving competence-based higher education. Furthermore, the Toolkit is easy to adapt to different field of studies.

Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to…

• get to know the Toolkit

• apply and reflect some tools of the IQM-HE in a realistic IQM setting

• discuss with persons, who developed and implemented the Toolkit at their universities, their lessons learnt about implementation (e.g. how to motivate decision makers to choose this toolkit or how to define a competence model)

• discuss with evaluation and implementation experts of University of Vienna and Bologna experts of WU Vienna the developed approach

• discuss with representatives of AQ Austria, ENQA, EAVE (also involved in the development of the Toolkit) about their view on IQM-HE and in general, how quality management can be more effective in their point of view and how a closer co‐operation between internal and external quality assurance could be realized

• Persons in charge of quality management

• Persons who are interested in Competence-Based Higher Education

Participants will…

• get to know the IQM-HE framework of the European Toolkit for Internal Quality Management in Competence-Based Higher Education.

• learn more about the advantages of participative approaches in evaluation.

• learn more about practical and flexible tools you could implement in your institution.

• apply and reflect tools of the IQM-HE in a realistic IQM setting.

• get an idea how to apply the IQM-HE framework within a Higher Education Institutions.

• Inputs

• Group works

• Discussions

Institutions that developed and implemented the Toolkit:

• University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna

• University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

• University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

• University of Oldenburg, Germany

• Vilnius University, Lithuania

Institutions that supported the development and implementation the Toolkit:

• ENQA

• EAEVE

• AQ Austria

• Bologna experts from the University of Economics and Business, Vienna

• Evaluation and implementation experts from the University of Vienna

For further reading:

Visit the website www.vetmeduni.ac.at/en/iqm-he/. There you can download for free the Handbook for Internal Quality Management in Competence-Based Higher Education (already available) as well as the whole Toolkit (available in January 2018).

Note: This workshop is designed for an audience of at least 10 persons up to 40 persons.