Prof. Muhsin Kar, THEQC President, Attends the 6th Central Asian International Forum on Quality Assurance in Education in Kazakhstan
Prof. Muhsin Kar, THEQC President, Attends the 6th Central Asian International Forum on Quality Assurance in Education in Kazakhstan
Prof. Muhsin Kar, President of the Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC), attended the 6th Central Asian International Forum on Quality Assurance in Education organised in Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan’s Independent Agency for Accreditation and Rating (IAAR) hosted the forum organised in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on 7-8 October 2022, with representatives from international accreditation agencies operating in the field of quality assurance in higher education from the relevant institutions of Türkiye, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, India, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and many other countries. President Kar and Assoc. Prof. Dilek Avşaroğlu, Academic Expert, represented THEQC in the forum organised at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University.
Speaking at the forum’s opening ceremony, President Kar said universities were operating in an increasingly international and global environment, creating new awareness. Pointing out that higher education institutions could contribute to the solution of problems in areas such as climate change, pandemic, raw materials, energy and food, with the participation of relevant stakeholders, alliances, and other cooperation models, President Kar expressed that this understanding would also bring a change in the approach to internationalization.
“We need to move from internationalization as a competition field to the internationalization of global cooperation,” said Prof. Kar and added that a significant contribution could be made to a more inclusive and sustainable world by strengthening the idea of global citizenship in higher education institutions where internationalization was expressed in different ways.
In addition, President Kar stated that THEQC regarded international cooperation as a necessary tool to increase the quality of education and research in the field of higher education, worked to spread this awareness in all Turkish universities, and, for this reason, included internationalization as a criterion in its external evaluation methods. Emphasizing that internationalization of quality assurance is as important as ensuring the internationalization of higher education institutions, President Kar stated that THEQC was an ENQA member, the application process for EQAR registration continued, and these developments constituted an important step towards the full integration of the Turkish higher education system into the European Higher Education Area.
Assoc. Prof. Dilek Avşaroğlu, THEQC Academic Expert, also made a presentation on “Students as the Quality Ambassadors”.
In the two-day forum, “The Influence of Global Reality on the Prospects for Education Development”, “University Architecture: New Models and Opportunities”, “The Quality of Medical Education in the Digital Transformation Era”, “Student-Centered Approach: Management and Culture”, and “Ranking – the Way to Academic Leadership” were the topics discussed.
