THEQC Organises Workshops on Quality Assurance in Graduate Education

The Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC) organised the “Workshop on Quality Assurance in Graduate Education” in Ankara and İstanbul to create a quality assurance framework for graduate schools offering graduate education.

THEQC hosted the workshop to expand the scope of the Health Sciences Institutes External Evaluation Program pilot study, started in 2022 by THEQC, to all institutes on 20 January 2023. The first workshop was conducted in Ankara with the participation of Prof. Muhsin Kar, THEQC President; Prof. Mustafa Çufalı, THEQC Vice-President; Prof. Feyza Arıcıoğlu, THEQC Council member; THEQC academic experts; and institutes’ governing body members from Anadolu, Ankara, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli, Atılım, Başkent, Bilkent, Çankaya, Dokuz Eylül, Gazi, Hacettepe, Kırşehir Ahi Evran, Konya Teknik, Middle East Technical, Selçuk, and TED Universities.

Speaking at the opening session of the workshop, President Kar expressed that THEQC worked on the establishment of internal quality assurance systems in higher education institutions through external evaluations, namely the Institutional External Evaluation and Follow-up Programs and that the Council took immediate steps to ensure strengthening the organisational structure and building capacity for this purpose. President Kar expressed that THEQC exerted efforts to find out how to evaluate graduate programs in the scope of quality assurance in higher education and added that graduate schools offering graduate education in higher education institutions played a great role in areas such as learning and teaching and research and development activities, that THEQC started a pilot study for health sciences institutes and aimed to expand it to all other institutes, and that the workshop was held for this purpose.

Prof. Feyza Arıcıoğlu, THEQC Council Member, pointed out the importance of education provided to the prospective academic staff by institutes and stated that THEQC started to work on evaluating health sciences institutes in terms of quality assurance in higher education in recent years by defining some evaluation criteria. Expressing that the workshop included activities on how to apply these criteria to all institutes, Prof. Arıcıoğlu thanked the participants.

The second workshop was hosted by İstanbul University on 23 January 2023 and conducted with the participation of institutes’ governing body members from Acıbadem, Akdeniz, Atatürk, Boğaziçi, Fırat, İstanbul, İstanbul Bilgi, İstanbul Medipol, İstanbul Technical, İstanbul Ticaret, İstanbul University-Cerrahpaşa, Koç, Marmara, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts, Turkish-German, Sabancı, Sakarya, Health Sciences, Yeditepe, and Yıldız Technical Universities.