EXPANDVET

About

The main aims:

Develop quality assurance in VET institutions through promotion of self-evaluation, quality benchmarking and networking in VET.

To promote the use of European Quality Assurance Reference Framework (EQAVET) in VET institutes.

To update the outcomes related to the implementation of CQAF in the view of adaptation to EQAVET.

To allow practical application of the quality assurance framework in VET through the use of online benchmarking tool and good practice database.

To promote international cooperation and exchange of experience through enhancement of thematic portal in quality assurance and expanding the Community of Practice.

Objectives:

To examine the existing approaches for quality assurance in participating countries

To transfer, adapt and pilot the benchmarking tool in Lithuania, Austria, Poland and United Kingdom.

To develop the Lithuanian and Polish language versions of the thematic portal.

To enrich the thematic portal with various content, documents, links, articles, videos.

To disseminate and promote the benchmarking tool at regional, national and European level. To collaborate in development of products and quality assurance practices.

The project will be implemented by 6 partners from 5 EU countries. The consortium is based on the effort to use the best European practice in the field of quality assurance systems in VET. Each country has its own tools, instruments and procedures as well as different contexts: different legislation, educational systems. From core partner IDEC (Greece) all other partners will be importing the innovation, which will eventually upgrade its ability to implement and benchmark quality assurance in VET.

In the project are expected following outcomes:

- On-line benchmarking tool, which offers VET institutions the possibility to compare their quality processes and practices and to identify their strong points and processes to be improved compared to competition. The core of the benchmarking tool is a multiple choice questionnaire to be filled in by VET providers. Each institution has to self-assess its state of fulfilment of the indicator in question and to compare its results with similar institutions operating in the same country and/or in other countries. The tool offers VET stakeholders, policy makers and consultants information on which indicators are at a good point of fulfilment by the majority of VET institutions concerned and which points need to be further enhanced. The benchmarking tool is hosted in the thematic portal.

- Web based quality sharing network and good practice centre establishing Community of Practice (CoP) in the field of quality assurance in VET. Establishment of CoP involves also a series of networking activities for VET stakeholders and practitioners, blogging in the thematic portal, creation of profiles over facebook and twitter.

- Thematic portal on quality assurance in VET, hosted in the address www.bequal.info. The portal includes the following functions: Online benchmarking tool, good practice centre, statistics, blogs, news and news feeds, links, library, resources and articles, polls, on-line login module and information on the project. The portal is multilingual. The national versions are not identical with the English one.

Impact on several levels: organisational, national, and international level. The dissemination activity will be organized in the partners’ organisations, on the national level (through national, sectoral) networks as well as international networks of the project partners. It is a challenge for the project consortium to make the project and its outputs visible as well as to ensure that the project result – thematic portal- would be easily accessed by all target groups.

Project duration: 01/10/2012 -30/09/2014

Funded by

logo LLP