Internal Quality Assurance System for the Higher Education: Experience of Ukraine and Poland

Abstract

The research paper investigates the state of the internal system of quality assurance for higher education and identifies the main approaches for its enhancement under the process of integration of Ukraine into the global educational area. The authors conducted a thorough analysis of the existing national and foreign approaches to the definition of “quality of education”. It has been determined that at different stages of the historical development of the society the requirements for education and its quality have changed, along with the content of the latter category. At a modern stage, content “quality of education” is comprehensive and contains the characteristics of all components of learning, the conditions and results of the educational process. A research on a practical nature of constructing and implementing the internal quality assurance system by the higher educational institutions of Ukraine has been carried out and the main shortcomings inherent in this process at the present stage has been determined on the basis of the survey conducted within the implementation of the international grant project “Quality Assurance System in Ukraine: Development on the Base of ENQA Standards and Guidelines” of the EU Erasmus + Programme. Among the main problems inherent in the internal quality assurance systems in Ukraine were determined the following: 1) ESG 2015, in particular regarding the internal quality assurance (namely, assurance, not just monitoring, evaluation, control), are still not completely comprehended and systematically not applied in national practice; 2) most of HEIs do not conduct student evaluation of time spent on studying the courses as well as analysis of their subjective evaluation of workload for learning; 3) insufficient provisions for internal systems of academic staff selection; 4) the low level of information transparency; limited information is publicly available to all internal and external stakeholders; 5) there is no common framework to which institutions can refer. This leads to strong differences in implementation of internal quality assurance procedures and thus to different results and outcomes. The research paper describes the experience of Polish higher educational institutions in terms of the developing an internal quality assurance system for the higher education. The main task of the further work is to identify the main approaches for improving the internal quality assurance system at the Ukrainian higher education institutions based on application of the best European experience.