Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The results of the first UK Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) were published in 2017, with each HEI receiving a Gold, Silver, or Bronze award. The TEF is comprised of three components: teaching quality, including student satisfaction; the institutional environment in which students learn; and student outcomes, including the performance of under-represented groups. This new classification, solely assessing the ‘teaching mission’ of the university produced an unfamiliar hierarchy of institutions. This chapter provides an overview of the rationales for the TEF as set out by policymakers. It also accounts for the development process of a new transparency tool which involved defining and measuring ‘teaching excellence’. It argues that the TEF can be viewed as a multi-purpose instrument which seeks to provide accountability (by providing performance data to inform applicant choice and fee rises) and drive improvement (through raising the importance of teaching and learning within HEIs). The analysis explores where the TEF is situated relative to established Quality Assurance agendas on the one hand, and wider government ambitions to reconfigure the higher education sector on the other. The paper concludes with a summary of what the wider EHEA community can learn from the implementation of the TEF.

This paper examines the activities and strategies of European Higher Education Quality Assurance Agencies (QAAs) and their use of learning outcomes as a means to make higher education quality transparent. Literature contends that learning outcomes provide useful indications of quality for a variety of stakeholders and for numerous purposes. Yet, there is a gap in both literature and policy understanding of how impactful learning outcomes have been in supporting educational improvement, coordination, transparency or any other intended goals. Given the considerable attention, political, and financial support devoted to competency-based education and learning outcomes, the question of ‘impact’ is critical. This paper triangulates the results of a survey of European QAA’s, case studies of evaluations of learning outcomes policies, and a meta-evaluation of those cases to examine the types of strategies the European QAA’s employ and examine the impact of elements such as goals and audience. The results demonstrate the limited impact of learning outcomes, which leads to a discussion of the learning outcomes activities as a policy problem. The findings of the study suggest that the potential of learning outcomes as a transparency tool is hindered by learning outcomes policies that are misaligned with goals, misapplied in implementation, and misdirected in goal choice.

This paper focuses on the discrete topic of including non-formal qualifications in national qualifications frameworks and how higher education interfaces with that process. It sets out to establish if there is evidence that the higher education sector is pro-actively assisting the process of inclusion, indifferent to it or overtly hostile. Data were drawn from policy and academic literature, from conference proceedings and from initial analysis of seven country reports produced by the Erasmus+ Project ‘NQF-IN’: Developing organisational and financial models for inclusion of non-formal qualifications in NQFs in 2017. The paper argues that the higher education sector continues to wield significant credentialising and epistemic access powers with regard to the design and function of NQFs and its sub-frameworks, and with regard to how non-formal qualifications are regarded within them. It suggests that additional research is now required on the practice and quality assurance aspects of this issue in advance of the deadline for the development of non-formal and informal learning policies due at national level in EU member states by 2018.

While quality assurance (QA) frameworks are often strongly rooted in academic traditions and national systems, some notable shifts and developments at European level are reshaping the narrative. One significant development came with the adoption at the Yerevan Ministerial Conference, in 2015, of the second version of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), linking QA more clearly to other transparency tools, i.e. qualifications frameworks, ECTS and the Diploma Supplement. A further development is that more and more countries are implementing the EHEA key commitment of periodic external QA performed by QA agencies working in compliance with the ESG. Not least, the development of a central database (as of 2018) that will provide easy access to results and reports of external quality assurance procedures across EHEA plays a further role in the provision of public information and in fostering the transparency of European higher education systems. Against this backdrop of developments and synergies between QA and transparency tools are the challenges of changing and revising national legal frameworks. Most countries show hesitation in their commitment to recognising the activity of foreign external quality assurance agencies working in line with the ESG or making provision to implement the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes. The article provides an in-depth analysis of the path taken by the Bologna signatory countries to achieve trust and transparency within the EHEA. In order to gauge the success of realising trust and transparency, a number of indicators are proposed and discussed. The article concludes with lessons learned.

This chapter discusses why governance and funding are currently serious matters of concern for public policy in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). It argues that discussions about governance are particularly intense in times of major change in the world around higher education, and that we are once again traversing such a period in Europe. External ruptures in society at-large and changing trends in higher education, which influence the policy discussions and reform initiatives on governance are summarized. The chapter puts forward a synopsis of some of the most important developments in governance and funding since the start of the Bologna Process and launch of the EHEA, and points to important current challenges. Finally, it introduces the papers of the governance and funding section of this volume.

Supported by qualitative and quantitative data collected under the USTREAM project (Universities for Strategic, Efficient and Autonomous Management, co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the EU) in 2016–2017, this paper explores theoretical and practical approaches to efficiency in universities and investigates system-level and institutional factors that affect it. It presents a multifaceted approach to efficiency based on three levels (system, sector and institutional) and dimensions of efficiency (operational efficiency, academic efficiency and efficiency through strategic governance). This framework is operationalised by analysing institutional trends and practices in efficiency and effectiveness. Leadership commitment, institutional autonomy and staff engagement are found to be among the key enablers of efficiency, whereas institutional reluctance to change, financial constraints for investment into efficiency programmes (e.g. technology and staff training) as well as concerns over quality are among the most common barriers. Efficiency measures are found to have both tangible and intangible outcomes in the short and long term, which could, however, be limited in terms of their replicability and measurability.

In this paper, we propose an overview of the current state of play of university governance in Europe, covering over 20 higher education systems, and an account of the main trends and recent evolutions in the field. Particular attention is devoted to the observed shifts in terms of power distribution and representation of the different university constituencies in the governing structure (students, academic and non-academic staff, external members). The paper exposes the level of autonomy that universities in Europe have today to configure their governance model in line with their missions and with societal expectations, focusing on the evolving relationship between universities and public authorities in this area.

University autonomy is a multi-dimensional concept. As previous studies have demonstrated, European universities have high levels of autonomy in some dimensions, but their autonomy is more limited in other dimensions. The European University Association (EUA) defines four dimensions of university autonomy: organizational autonomy, financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and academic autonomy. This paper uses statistical analyses to investigate whether these four dimensions of university autonomy are interconnected. Findings suggest that there is an overall lack of prominent, linear relationships among these dimensions, with the exception of staffing autonomy and academic autonomy, which are significantly positively linked to each other.

Trust plays a vital role in the cooperation of social actors. While researching trust becomes important in public management, the impact of trust on higher education policy and management has drawn less attention. This chapter analyses the introduction of the chancellor system in Hungarian higher education from the perspective of trust. In this new governance model, chancellors, who are appointed by the government, became responsible for the administration and budgets of higher institutions (HEIs), while rectors kept their prerogatives only on academic issues. The success of an institution now depends on the cooperation of its two interdependent leaders. Trust plays an especially critical role in such leadership constellation. The study is based on empirical data collected through two surveys conducted in 2015 and 2016 among academic leaders of Hungarian higher education institutions and uses Hurley’s decision-to-trust-model (Hurley ) as an analytic framework.

Increasingly, governments have introduced elements of performance in the funding mechanisms for their higher education institutions. One particular development is the rise of Performance Agreements (PAs), which are contracts signed between funding authorities and individual universities or colleges. The key characteristics of the PAs in place in several OECD countries are summarized before turning to the Netherlands, where an experiment with PAs was recently (2016) concluded. The question is whether this experiment improved performance in the higher education system, where ‘performance’ is understood in terms of the students’ graduation rates, the quality of teaching and learning and the diversity in the provision of education and research. What has been achieved in these areas? And what can be learned from the Dutch performance agreements experiment in general?