Pairwise Collaborative Quality Enhancement: Experience of Two Engineering Programmes in Iceland and France

Quality in higher educational programmes is acquired over a long period. Depending on their location, history, tradition, management style or culture, institutions have their own strengths, but also constraints and priorities for quality enhancement. Analysing or even just seeing how programme leaders and developers are managing educational quality in partner countries may provide an opportunity to learn from them and transfer some of their good practices to one´s own context. As a constructivist complement to accreditation to foster quality, a 2015 pilot study showed the strong potential of a large self-evaluation model including maturity scale to shed light on priorities. The focus of this paper is to critically examine the self-evaluation model and a cross-sparring process, and to assess which parts of the process proved beneficial. Even if very valuable, via short but prepared visits to learn from each other, it shows that (i) the number of criteria in focus should be limited to ensure a deep collaborative analysis and actionable plans, and that (ii) the forms used to report must remain simple and flexible so as to be delivered under time constraints. Thanks to the cross-sparring process, the study validated a flexible and non-competitive approach to stimulate thought and discussion about collaborative quality enhancement at international levels, even without dedicated quality referents in the institutions or a formal quality assurance framework in place. Given the large numbers and nature of higher educational institutions, this practical model reveals an excellent approach to institutions in need of continuous improvement.