(260) HOW COMMITTED TO TEACHING QUALITY IS YOUR INSTITUTION? - THE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION QUALITY MODEL (THEQM) - UTILIZING NINETY NINE PLUS ONE QUALITY INDICATORS

摘要

Teaching quality is becoming a strategic direction of the European Higher Education Area reforms. Itsimportance is recently gaining more and more recognition by both the policy makers as well as thevarious providers of higher education. The vision and mission of Universities, even of thoseuniversities who have been traditionally focused mainly on basic research address now a morebalanced provision of teaching and research. This paper introduces THEQM, the Teaching in HigherEducation Quality Model. THEQM is a model, which measures the commitment of institutions ofHigher Education to teaching quality. The model is based on the Report of the European Commission(EC) “Improving the quality of teaching and learning in Europe's higher education institutions”. Basedon the various recommendations for improving teaching, addressed in the report, we have defined onehundred (ninety nine plus one) quality indicators and propose herein, a model based on a numericsystem for measuring the adherence to these recommendations/indicators by a particular institution,thus measuring the institution's commitment to teaching quality. Herein, we refer to teaching in themore general form of teaching and learning as encompassed in the student centred learning model,thus referring to all learning activities that involve the educator/teacher as facilitator of the studentlearning process. We are in the process of receiving feedback for our model and at the same timebuilding a web-based tool, namely THEQMTool that will provide an on-line version of THEQM;;the toolwill allow an institution to carry out a self-assessment of its commitment to teaching quality, and findout how it compares (ranking wise and anonymously) to a number of other institutions that havecarried out the same self-assessment exercise.