Toolkit for the Quality Assurance of Cross-Border Higher Education (CBHE)

The project has been backed by the European Commission since 2013, under the coordination of ENQA, and aims to improve the quality assurance of cross-border activities of national higher education institutions, such as double degree programmes, offshore campuses, higher education franchises, and international offshoots. These lesser known activities are rarely evaluated by authorities in the institutions’ host countries and face challenges that national quality assurance agencies hope to understand better.

Hcéres has been an active partner in the project, working in collaboration with ENQA, the British, Spanish, and Australian evaluation agencies (QAA, ANECA, TEQSA), the German Accreditation Council (GAC), the Asia-Pacific Quality Network (APQN) and the Arab Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ANQAHE).

The conference closed the project and was attended by over 110 participants from 38 different countries across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Discussions focussed particularly on:

• the challenges of understanding and evaluating cross-border higher education activities;
• findings from national investigations led by the project’s various partners, compiled in country reports (QACHE Report – Country report - France);
• Conclusions from regional meetings held in Europe, the Gulf and Asia;
• The need for continued active collaboration.

Key outputs from the project:

• Development of “Cooperation in cross-border higher education – A toolkit for quality assurance agencies”, which provides agencies with guidance on a number of activities, including information sharing, inter-agency cooperation and network-based collaboration in networks.
• Adoption of a multi-faceted approach to CBHE
• Acknowledgement of the lack of an information and regulatory system for CBHE;
• Inter-agency cooperation as a tool to remedy this situation.

Presentation aids from the conference:

• Higher Education going global: challenges and opportunities – (Sijbolt Noorda)
• Quality Assurance of Cross-Border Higher Education – the state of the art (Paula Ranne)
• Quality Assurance of Cross-border Higher Education:Survey Results & Analysis (Tariq Al-Sindi)
• Regional views on cross-border higher education from Europe, Arab Region, and Asia-Pacific: The European perspective(Rafael Llavori)
• Quality Assurance of Cross-border Higher Education :Views from Asia Pacific (Jagannath Patil)
• Cooperation in Cross-Border Higher Education: A Toolkit for Quality Assurance Agencies (Fabrizio Trifiro)