European Quality Assessment

2.6 EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The European Network for Quality Assessment in Higher Education was created in 2000 to stimulate European cooperation in the quality assessment field. In November 2004, the General Assembly converted the Network at the Association for Quality Assessment in Higher Education. The idea of creating a European association was originated by the Quality Pilot Project of Higher Education Evaluation (1994-95), which demonstrated the value of sharing experiences and developing quality assessment area. It was later reinforced this intention by the Council Recommendation (September 1998) on European cooperation in quality assessment on higher education and by the Bologna Declaration of

The fact that quality assessment be one of the keystones of the European Higher Education stimulated the organization to become an important role in this quality process and, in result, one of the most active organizations on quality assessment implementation in European Union. To reinforce this role, the European Network for Quality Assessment in Higher Education conducts numerous workshops, prepares reports, contributes to groups associated to the Bologna Process and proposes to enlarge its activities regarding to quality assessment in activities related to e-learning.

The European Network for Quality Assessment has the European Commission financial support for their activities. Among these activities is the completion of several quality related projects, and others to begin. They already concluded external evaluations to network members, as well as a study on the quality convergence in Europe, among others. Alongside with the projects implementation is the quality documents preparation, which proved fundamental in the Bologna process

In fact, the relevance of this study is confirmed by the opinion of several authors (Lomas, 2007; Nasser & Fresko, 2002; Newton, 2000; Westerheijden, Hulpiau & Waeytens, 2007; Santiago, Sousa, Carvalho, Machado-Taylor & Dias, 2014; Dias, Machado, Santiago, Carvalho & Sousa, 2013) which advocate that the knowledge of academics opinions and attitudes on quality assessment are still relatively underdeveloped. Indeed, the academics support to the quality assessment processes, like core values, goals and methods, is critical to their successful implementation and a factor influencing the accuracy and meaningfulness of the results achieved (Laughton, 2003). Moreover, the awareness of academics opinions and attitudes on quality assessment could be a crucial factor to an effective human resources management of the faculty