Wednesday - Yerevan, and Ararat appears!

Lunchtime, in between site visits to Brusov and YSAFA. The programme teams on the ground are fully engaged and making great progress towards the development of new programme documents. Very impressive! And this morning, the skies clear and Mount Ararat appears! A BIG mountain, aptly termed as 'Biblical'! Incredible!

Rainy Monday - Brusov

Monday face to face workshop - Brusov

YSAFA workshop - Tuesday

Mount Ararat appears! Biblical! Wednesday.

Library stacks - Brusov

Timetable - Brusov

Croatia - Training and Rijeka

After intensive ASHE (Agency for Science and Higher Education) panel training in Zagreb, we minibus to Rijeka on the Adriatic coast. Great panel discussions. First site visit tomorrow. Views below from the hotel room...

expert panel training, ASHE HQ Zagreb, experts from across Europa

view from Hotel Jadran

the town looks like it was designed by Hayao Miyazaki

IADT Plagiarism Policy - staff briefing

Yesterday, as part of my Teaching and Learning Committee responsibilities, I assisted Dr. Marion Palmer in a staff briefing on IADT's revised Plagiarism Policy in the STAR. A (tellingly) small group, but excellent questions and a lively, engaged debate commences the Committee's cross-Institute briefings.

We need to get all heads (lecturers and students) around the fact that reliable and appropriate sourcing, referencing and attribution of all types of media is not just an academic exercise, but is a key research skill and a crucial part of the development of professional practice.

Uncontrolled mash-up, reuse and blasé or willful ignorance of copyright and IP issues can be the paths to amateurism, IP theft and ultimately bad business. The debate will continue over the next few months!

http://www.iadt.ie/en/InformationAbout/TeachingandLearning/PlagiarismPolicy/

Tempus Align in Ghent!

Spent all of last week (Sunday 28th of Sept to Friday 3rd of October) in Ghent on Tempus Align Work Programme 1 training in the spectacular city of Ghent in Flanders. Some excellent work by our Align partners from Armenia, Russia and Ukraina, with some real traction on their individual alignment projects. We learned many many valuable lessons from our Align partners, which we will take back to our own programmes, institutions and nations! And we had some fun too, with the entire group coming together to push the project forward, despite many national, sectoral and institutional challenges.

Immense congratulations to IADT's Tara Ryan on her work in developing the WP1 Capacity Building training, and a huge thank you to Andre Govaert for his brilliant organisation of the Ghent events, including the cultural activities! Immense thanks also to our European partners Mila Zarkh, Zbigniew Palka, Inna Pomorina, Paul Hyland and Romain Hulpia for their hugely valuable contributions to the WP1 training.

The final days's KU Leuven postgraduate presentations were an eye-opener - clearly showing how real-world problems, excellent research and funding can result in great benefits for students, institutions and society! A model for us all!

less than 10 weeks to WP1 Capacity Building training in Dublin!

guided tour of Ghent with Antony

Ukraina's Sumy State, hard at work

Armenian working group

Ukraina's Taras Shevchenko University's Andrii and Volodomir with Mila

The fabulous Russian working group!

guided tour of  KU Leuven's Brewing Department

Tempus ALIGN Dusseldorf finishes...

Our Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday sessions on planning Training for Work Package 1 of the Tempus Align project finally come to a successful close. with a very useful Skype call with David Woodhouse! Training Session One takes place in Ghent on the week of the 29th of September...

Great work done in Dusseldorf...

State of play of the European Qualifications Framework implementation

Really fantastic European Parliamentary Research Service webpage on the current status of EQF implementation. Some great paratextual resources here!

http://epthinktank.eu/2013/10/02/state-of-play-of-the-european-qualifications-framework-implementation/

http://ec.europa.eu/eqf/home_en.htm

http://ec.europa.eu/eqf/compare/ie_en.htm#comparison

Tara Ryan's ALIGN thought for the week...

Your Align Learning Outcomes Thought for the Week – Happy New Week, January 27th, 2014.

cartoon
From:  http://www.assuringlearning.com/

  
And for those of you who like words – here are some other thoughts: 

Learning Outcomes, Qualifications Frameworks and Quality Assurance
“It is almost a truism to say that the absorption and application of the concept of learning outcomes is the most recognisable feature of the recent Europe-wide growth in qualifications frameworks. The notion of what a qualification now represents has been fundamentally reoriented in this process – the EQF Recommendation, for example, defines a qualification as the ‘formal outcome of an assessment and validation process which is obtained when a competent body determines that an individual has achieved learning outcomes to given standards’. The architecture of qualification frameworks (level descriptors, individual qualifications descriptors etc.), at the national and European levels, are also invariably constructed as generic or specific statements of learning outcomes (knowledge, skill and competence).

And yet learning outcomes are not the preserve of qualifications frameworks alone.  The use of learning outcomes to define the expectations of learners and workers predates the recent growth in European NQFs by many years; In the context of the development of the Bologna Process, it is noteworthy that it was a group of quality assurance agencies, known collectively as the Joint Quality Initiative, who undertook much of the groundwork in specifying learning outcomes for higher education qualifications. The group’s key output, the so-called ‘Dublin Descriptors’ – generic learning outcomes descriptors for Bachelor, Masters and Doctoral Qualifications – would eventually become the centrepiece of the QF-EHEA.

In tandem with this work, quality assurance agencies also played a key role, through the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education’s (ENQA) development of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), which provided for the development, publication and assessment of explicit intended learning outcomes, as a key element of the internal quality assurance of higher education institutions.

Since the adoption of the ESG and QF-EHEA some countries, including for example, Denmark  and Sweden, have introduced formal implementation systems for their higher education qualification frameworks, in which national quality assurance agencies play a central role in evaluating and assessing the outcomes of study programmes. Reflecting a growing awareness of the increasing role of quality agencies as key contributors to NQF implementation, ENQA has also taken the step of organising a number of seminars on the theme of qualifications frameworks and their relationship to quality assurance.  These points are well made in Referencing National Qualifications Levels to the EQF - European Qualifications Framework Series Note 3 (2nd edn., forthcoming 2013).” (Murray, J. 2013)

http://www.eu2013.ie/media/eupresidency/content/documents/QQI-Presidency-Paper-Publication-(12-March).pdf

Quality Assurance in Qualifications Frameworks An issues paper to support the Dublin Conference, organised by Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), on behalf of the Irish Presidency of the European Council, with the support of the European Commission Authored by Dr Jim Murray (Ireland) March 2013