13th European Quality Assurance Forum

The 13^th European Quality Assurance Forum focused on how institutions and quality assurance agencies can build systems that encompass a broad range of activities, including learning and teaching, research, governance and administration, and service to society.

As a tool for supporting the quality of higher education, quality assurance (QA) has, in many European higher education systems, focused largely on learning and teaching. However, as underlined in the introduction to the Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the EHEA (ESG), Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should have QA policies and processes that cover other institutional activities, and in parallel, external QA is increasingly looking into these policies.

While it is clear that degrees from accredited HEIs form the gold standard in terms of their recognition and portability, no clear set of comprehensive criteria exists to assess the quality of new forms of credentials, nor for standards and technologies which are applied to credentials. The authors of this paper therefore proposed a framework for such analysis in the form of a set of quality characteristics for credentials, based on work conducted by the OEPass project.