
THEQC Launches the International Institutional Accreditation Program
- Date 3 July 2024
THEQC Launches the International Institutional Accreditation Program
ANKARA – The Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC) is expanding its quality assurance activities to include HEIs abroad. THEQC has completed its legislative arrangements to launch the International Institutional Accreditation Program (IIAP), the first cross-border activity of the Agency, aiming at evaluating the quality assurance of HEIs abroad and granting accreditation.
IIAP will make it possible to use THEQC’s accreditation model, which was developed for the compliance of HEIs in Türkiye with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), abroad. The model has currently been implemented in 73 universities in Türkiye.
With IIAP, an accreditation decision is made for HEIs by making a maturity level evaluation considering the planning, doing, checking and acting stages in an evaluation system that includes 14 criteria and 46 sub-criteria under the main headings of “Governance and Quality,” “Learning and Teaching,” “Research and Development”, and “Service to Society”. IIAP, which is an international adaptation of the Institutional Accreditation Program model developed specifically for Türkiye in compliance with ESG, has been prepared upon requests from HEIs in many countries, especially those considered to be Türkiye’s heartland. Giving information about the program, Prof. Ümit Kocabıçak, THEQC President, stated that THEQC plans that the process will be completed in the fall for the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) and the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR), the umbrella organisations of which THEQC is a member, to approve IIAP.
President Kocabıçak expressed that the unique structure of IIAP reveals the evaluated HEI’s resource and competence management, follow-up and improvement processes, stakeholder involvement and inclusiveness, strengths in the internal quality assurance system and areas for improvement related to governance and quality, learning and teaching, research and service to society processes. He emphasised that IIAP is an accreditation activity that will guide HEIs about the sustainability of the quality assurance system in the rapidly changing structure of the higher education landscape and the ways to maintain competitive advantage.
Stating that THEQC has evaluated approximately 92 percent of HEIs in Türkiye under the Institutional External Evaluation Program and 36 percent under the Institutional Accreditation Program as of April 2024, President Kocabıçak said that over 90 percent of the HEIs in Türkiye are targeted to be evaluated within the scope of the accreditation program by 2028. He added that THEQC is planning to go beyond and aims to offer its field experience to a wider geography.
THEQC is planning to carry out the first implementations of IIAP in the field in the last quarter of this year.