Quality and Evaluation in Higher Education

Abstract

Quality is important in industrial production and all kinds of services. In particular, education is one very important service for our society. Since the Bologna process, European universities try to do their best using the resources the society has given them to satisfy the needs of the European citizens.

Quality is very important but it has no value without a well-established system of continuous improvement based on measurement and knowledge of our capabilities and the needs of the society. The best way to measure the results of a service is by the way of the evaluation. Evaluation always needs to consider two inputs: self-evaluation and external evaluation, but it is particularly interesting when evaluation is considered for improving, not when evaluation is considered as inspection.

During this paper, a review and comparative analysis between quality and evaluation in industry and in universities, based on the author´s own experience, will be done. The experience of industries and other services implemented in our world is a source of knowledge for improvement, so the main part of this paper will be addressed to the review of what is done in industries and how to translate it into the European Higher Education Area. Finally, some proposals for daily activity in university education will be presented, based on the experience of the research group EduQTech.