EQANIE Workshop on Quality Assurance held on October 11th, 2010 in Prague

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Posted on 15 October 2010

On October 11th 2010, participants from 12 European countries gathered for the EQANIE Workshop on Quality Assurance accross Europe. In his introduction to EQANIE the President of the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education (EQANIE), Prof. Hans-Ulrich Heiss, highlighted the need for a system of generating mutual trust leading to enhanced mobility in the European Higher Education Area, and in particular in the rapidly evolving field of informatics.

This aim, he argued, is facilitated by awarding the Euro-Inf Label to those informatics degree programmes complying with the European sectoral qualifications framework, the so-called Euro-Inf Framework Standards and Accreditation Criteria.

EQANIE awards the Quality Label and further develops the Euro-Inf Framework for Assessment. It is composed of member organisations with an interest in enhancing the quality of informatics education. Some of the countries represented within EQANIE have developed quality assurance criteria targeted specifically at degree programmes in informatics higher education. Two case studies of those countries, Hungary and Spain, were presented at the EQANIE workshop.

Prof. Janos Csirik of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee presented the Hungarian System of external Quality Assurance. Hungary is not yet directly represented in EQANIE. Frauke Muth, Secretary of EQANIE presented a case study on the implementation of the Bologna Process in the Spanish informatics higher education.

After having discussed the quality assurance systems for informatics higher education in two European Countries, the Chair of the EQANIE Accreditation Committee, Prof. Roland Ibbett, continued the programme with a presentation on the criteria and guidelines used in EQANIE-assessments. Finally, Prof. Olaf Zukunft from the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg talked about experiences with a Euro-Inf auditing visit from the perspective of the applicant institution.

The conclusion of the EQANIE-workshop in the afternoon of October 11th marked the beginning of the European Computer Science Summit 2010, jointly organised by Informatics Europe and the Czech Technical University in Prague.