Quality Commission
Through the Quality Commission of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH), collaborative work will be promoted to delve deeper into the critical issues of the country's quality assurance system. The result will be a document of proposals reflecting a shared perspective of the CRUCH.
On the first day of in-person work of the commission, at the University of the Andes, the president of the CNA, Andrés Bernasconi, participated, who highlighted the importance of the launch of the commission and expressed his interest in maintaining a collaborative dialogue.
Contributing with proposals for improvement to the National System of Quality Assurance of Higher Education (Law 20.129) is the goal set by the Quality Commission of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH) in its first face-to-face session, which took place on July 3 at the University of the Andes (UAndes).
To this end, the commission, comprised of the quality assurance officers from the CRUCH universities, will analyze the main critical issues and propose solutions in a document. In this regard, the rector of UAndes and head of the Quality Commission, José Antonio Guzmán, indicated that the aim is to develop a shared perspective within CRUCH through a document that “will be made available to the public and to organizations involved in the topic, in order to make a concrete and relevant contribution to the current circumstances, a specific contribution to the Quality Assurance System.”.
Rector Guzmán added that “while universities have a lot of accumulated experience at an individual level, it is necessary to share it in a more organic way (…) with work topics, with objectives, with goals and a certain structure, which will allow us to make an even more forceful contribution, which will serve not only the universities, but also contribute to the system improving more and more in quality, making it compatible with the rest of the country's objectives.”.
For his part, the president of the National Accreditation Commission (CNA), Andrés Bernasconi, who participated in the event, noted that it would be “very interesting if an official document could be generated by the Council of Rectors, which could be the basis for thinking together about how to improve the accreditation system and internal quality assurance.”.
Meanwhile, the Secretary General of CRUCH, Angélica Bosch, highlighted the importance of this collaboration, considering the relevance of universities in contributing to quality assurance through their own work, which allows them to play an active role in this matter.
More collaboration, more quality
In order to delve deeper and better understand the critical issues of the Quality Assurance System, the participants analyzed five main topics: internal institutional quality systems; criteria and standards in undergraduate studies; criteria and standards in postgraduate studies; research on the impact of quality policies; and peer evaluators.
The proposals on these topics were valued by the president of the CNA, who noted that knowing the various proposals will allow him to reflect on them with the CNA team, "since these are the perspectives that exist in a very important sector of the university system, such as the one represented in this Council," Bernasconi commented.
Rector Guzmán appreciated the presence of the CNA president. “We all want to do things right, and in that sense, the quality assurance system can help us do better, but it needs to be based on collaboration rather than oversight, and in that sense, I think the possibility of working together with the CNA president is a tremendous opportunity,” he said.
Text and photos: CRUCH Communications.
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