Dealing with engagement issues – an examination of professionals’ opinions on stakeholder involvement in quality assurance

Here quality assurance is very much understood as values and practices that are shared by the institutional community and that have to be nurtured on many levels and by various means at the same time. How institutions could come to such shared understandings however and how they can develop ways of engaging all of their major stakeholder groups in the joint development of such a quality culture continues to be a challenge. Drawn from discussions in a series of workshops with QA practitioners from all over Europe this paper will analyse the most critical factors with regard to stakeholder involvement and propose a number of actions on how the problem can be tackled — or at least reframed in a constructive way.

This paper was presented at EQAF and reflects the views of the named authors only.