Throughout Europe, higher education institutions on regularly basis ought to go through an external process that will assess their quality and the system they have in place to assure it. Students, main education consumer, should play an important role in the processes that examine the quality of education. But due to lack of capacity, expertise and professional experience, their feedback is often disregarded and participation discouraged. The project aims to provide students with sufficient knowledge and resources to ensure their position as equal partners in the institutions’ evaluation. Recent changes in the Slovak legislature (Law on Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 269/2018 Z. z.) and lacking students experts in Hungary forced both student unions to seek an expert support in the European Students' Union and the European Consortium for Accreditation. In 24 months the four organisations will address challenges met not only by students and QA system in Slovakia and Hungary but are spread all around the continent. The results of the projects will raise awareness and develop strategies for more meaningful European students’ involvement in the quality assurance.The main activities of the project include:- Development of training materials (trainer handbook & video course) for the purposes of student experts’ training. These should based on both the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) and national specific regulations on quality assurance. These materials will be available for an open access and will be used also by other national and institutional students' unions.- Student expert training is the main learning activity that will directly contribute to the creation of the student expert pool both in Hungary and Slovakia. This activity will make use of materials and other documents prepared throughout the project.- The ESU QA Student Expert Pool is a network of student experts from entire Europe, established to support cross-border QA evaluations and foster the exchange of good practices and expertise. This project will boost the network by providing new materials, publications, and experts that will become a valuable asset for this developing network. - Policy recommendations will be drafted both on national and European level to address the situation as identified by the reports and experts in participating countries.- Awareness about QA is necessary for the sustainable continuation of the project and student expert recruitment. Report on the best practices on national levels will focus on the involvement of students in existing internal quality assurance system at individual universities. Two rounds of discussions with experts and students will help to spread findings of the report and other project outputs. The project will finish with two conferences, one will address the topic of QA and the place of students within that system. The second will focus on policy recommendations and presentation of ESU QA Student Expert Pool.European Students' Union and European Consortium for Accreditation are partners with great experience and useful resources. This strategic partnership aims to make use of their experience, train Slovak and Hungarian QA experts, develop and translate materials so they could be used for future training purposes. In the later stages, when Slovak and Hungarian students' unions will work on their intellectual outputs, ESU and ECA will serve as evaluators and provide feedback to ensure high quality of the project outputs. As the systems are still developing any materials developed through this process will become a valuable resource for the future. Those are going to be also shared with other national students' unions in Europe to promote also greater European cooperation in this field. The current situation opens an opportunity for students to participate in an evaluation of quality and raise voice in the future development of higher education, through this project we want to take this opportunity and provide students with means to participate on equal expert level.

Since the beginning of the Erasmus programme in 1987, the number of bilateral agreements allowing for the exchange of students between higher education institutions has increased massively. In recent years however, the focus in setting up such agreements has shifted more and more from quantity to quality, from “partners” to “partnerships”. The question now is: how can we objectively monitor the quality of our partnerships? In Flanders this question led to the development of an Online Quality Assessment Tool for International Cooperation (eQuATIC). This tool measures and exposes the strengths and weaknesses in international cooperation and partnerships. The main principle of eQuATIC is the use of quantified indicators, derived from data that were already available and were taken from various data sources. By converting quantitative and descriptive data into figures, cooperation with partners at different levels can easily be analysed and improved.The project on Assessing quality of partnerships amongst Higher Education Institutions created several Intellectual Outputs to support HEIs in the adoption of the eQuATIC tool. First of all, a research was carried out on how institutions use data for internationalisation in higher education and how they deal with international partnerships. The research made clear that: • Most institutions do not have a policy for setting up, adapting or ending international partnerships.• Inactive international partnerships are rarely actively ended; mostly the partnership agreements are allowed to stay in the files indefinitely or they expire without further notice.• Although institutions typically gather many data on mobility these data are mostly not used in a systematic manner to inform institutions’ policies and decision-making on international partnerships. • Whilst in general institutions perceive the quality of international partnerships as a priority for internationalisation, most institutions do not pursue a quality assurance policy on the formation, monitoring and withdrawal from inter-institutional agreements.Building on these research findings guidelines on improving mobility-enabling university partnerships were created, also including instructions on how the eQuATIC tool could be used by institutions. The guidelines are a first step for institutions interested in using the eQuATIC tool but could also be used for shaping partnership policies at HEIs.The wide dissemination campaign that was carried out during the project duration certainly raised awareness and interest by many Higher Education Institutions. Besides the guidelines, those institutions could use the peer assessment toolbox, that was created in the context of the project. It functions as a support platform to start using the eQuATIC tool. With the information on the peer assessment toolbox, institutions can prepare their data uploads enabling them to start using the tool inside their own organisation. In total 68 institutions have an account to test out eQuATIC. Upon successful upload of their own data, these institutions can consult the eQuATIC reports to assess their own partnerships. Furthermore, in the context of the project a self-assessment report has been created where institutions can consult their own strengths and weaknesses as an international partner.A final output is a training toolkit. Two pilot trainings took place in the course of the project and participants highly valued the content and approach of such trainings, rating the overall satisfaction with 4,9/5. Most participants actively started using the tool after taking part in the training.Besides the upscaling of the eQuATIC tool itself that was clearly successful, the project partners also promoted the principles of data-informed policy making and quality assurance for international partnerships. The policy recommendations that were produced in this regard were shared with policymakers at the level of the European Commission, national authorities and HEIs.Because of the synergies with the Erasmus Without Paper project, a more long-term impact is envisaged. In this context, it is important to stress the explicit support from the European Commission for bottom-up initiatives like eQuATIC. A representative from the European Commission took part in the final dissemination event and the project was thoroughly discussed during a meeting in preparation for the event. Moreover, in the context of the Erasmus Without Paper project, the European University Foundation and Ghent University are preparing a first blueprint on how the eQuATIC principles on data-informed policymaking could become part of the EWP infrastructure in the future.

Qual-AI-ty Engagement is forward-looking project aimed at disrupting the higher education through artificial intelligence (AI) and genuine commitment to quality as derived from student engagement with society. It aims to do so by empowering key actors in higher education: namely quality assurance (QA) staff through comprehensive training and cooperation in the project and students, who are a major contributing factor to the entire project through their co-creation and participation in piloting activities.Student engagement in general, and with society in particular has been only recently the topic of academic/policy circles in Europe, despite its multi-faceted benefits. The concept of education-promoted engagement with society in general has been noted in 2015 Paris “Declaration on promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination through education” where “ensuring that children and young people acquire social, civic and intercultural competencies, by promoting democratic values and fundamental rights, social inclusion and non-discrimination as well as active citizenship” (European Commission, 2016) has been identified as one of the quintessential objectives amongst the EU Member States, especially in the light of various events in the second decade of 21st century. Going into fine-grained particularities, student engagement with societal challenges holds a rich potential in i) fostering active citizenship and preparing students for more active engagement in democratic societies; ii) cultivating their personal development through early civic engagement; iii) making significant contribution to coming up with innovative solutions for societal problems and affecting their communities, and immediate and larger social surroundings, iv) taking control over their educational trajectories as ‘producers of knowledge’ rather than just ‘consumers’. Universities have been often perceived as not taking a proactive role in engaging more with the society-related issues, and when they did it would be narrowed down to a specific domain only (e.g. environment). (GUNi, 2019) Following the remarks of Europe 2030 Agenda, it is blatantly clear that a plethora of societal problems can and should be addressed via HEI involvement to ensure participatory politics, multilateral, innovative & resilient societies, sustainable production chains, collaborative low carbon circular economy and social economy ecosystems. (Europe 2030 Agenda, 2019).While student engagement with society carries a lot of potential, it needs to be enshrined in structures of the HE to truly be exploited to its full capacity, rather than posing as a constellation of isolated (program-specific) interventions. This is where quality assurance staff can play a pivotal role. According to The Communication on Improving and Modernising Education “quality education for all is a foundation for social cohesion and an open society” (European Commission, 2016). However, quality assurance is oftentimes a neglected aspect of higher education. Majority of quality assurance mechanisms and instruments are based on quantitative data collection and interpretation. This approach often can case valuable insights to fall “through the cracks”. Very often quality assurance processes have been reduced to mechanical, “tick-the-box” behaviour. (Nair et al., 2010) Qual-AI-ty Engagement project aims at breaking the old tradition and enforcing a new approach to assessing the quality of education offering by predominantly focusing on qualitative approach and maximising on the efficiency of data provision by leveraging AI/machine learning possibilities.This project aims to empower quality assurance staff to take more proactive role in leveraging student engagement as a means of maximising the quality of the educational provision on the institutional level. By empowering quality assurance staff more to engage more actively with students and their endeavours within society, the aim is to create a nurturing space where society engagement on the part of students is actively promoted, visible and rewarded in the higher education landscapes.

SYSTEMIC UNIVERSITY CHANGE TOWARDS INTERNATIONALISATION for AcademiaThe aim of the project is to raise awareness and shift the internal culture of our institutions towards internationalization, thus creating a systemic change in our institutions and in European Higher Education. SUCTI Academia is built on SUCTI, which was is a three-year initiative (2016-2019) approved for funding under the European Commission’s Erasmus+ – KA2 Strategic Partnerships for higher education focusing on the internationalisation of administrative staff. The project was coordinated by the URV, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). SUCTI has already shown that systemic change through trainings for administrative staff is a key to success of the international university and the impact of this change has been measured and assessed.Shifting a culture is only possible through internationalizing all groups of higher education institutions can we truly talk about international universities. While many activities exist for internationalising students and the predecessor project SUCTI concentrated on the administrative staff, SUCTI Academia now aims at empowering the third pillar, the academic staff, by providing them with knowledge and skills related to their university’s internationalisation process. Investments have been made in the internationalization of this group in an attempt to increase their impact on more international research and publications, more internationalized courses, more international programs. However, in order to perform those international tasks, the academics (scholars, researchers, teachers) need to have the right preparation, training, skills and knowledge to do it properly. Courses delivered at SUCTI partner universities also showed that there is a clear need among academics to get training on internationalisation. Academic staff is expected to internationalize both the teaching as well as research in their academic work while it may happen that they not equipped with the right tools and skills to deliver it properly. What is more, if they are convinced of the importance and added value of internationalisation they can become genuine change agents. In this way, they can make a key contribution to the overall objective of the project which is to transform the internal mind-set of universities and enable them to become truly internationalised institutions.

The European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes (adopted by Ministers in Yerevan on 14-15 May 2015) is meant to be a huge step forward in removing barriers in QA for establishing and operating joint programmes. This approach has been design to enable any EQAR-registered external quality assurance agency to carry out a single QA procedure of a joint programme using the agreed European criteria and methodology. The outcomes of this single QA procedure should then be accepted by the other EHEA countries that are involved in the joint programme. However, despite the fact that this single accreditation approach was highly expected by all stakeholders, its practical implementation faced numerous challenges and obstacles. In 2017, when the ImpEA project was launched, only 19 out of 49 countries of the European Higher Education Area offered higher education institutions the possibility to use the European Approach at all. The main aim of the project was to support efficient implementation of the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes. This aim was meant to be achieved by successful completion of the following objectives: 1. Identifying key obstacles in implementation of the European Approach in the European Higher Education Area in general, and project partner countries in particular; 2. Supporting partner QA agencies in running EA-based programme accreditation procedures (ex ante and ex post); 3. Supporting partner HEIs in pursuing the external accreditation based on the EA; 4. Developing an EA implementation toolkit (set of recommendations and proposed solutions for the policy makers and QA agencies).The main target audience and direct impact groups of the project were the following: European and national policy-making bodies, higher education institutions, quality assurance agencies in terms of enhanced awareness and understanding of the European Approach. For the project partners and participants of of the project events, this was achieved through their direct involvement in, and contribution to the activities. This means in particular the work carried out in order to develop and deliver the intellectual outputs, training events, multiplier and dissemination activities.Above-mentioned members of the project target groups, not engaged in the project activities directly, this ‘enhanced capacity’ effect will be achieved through the project publications, dissemination activities and foremost, the availability of the European Approach online toolkit (www.impea.eu).The ImpEA project has received a very keen interest throughout its duration and past it. This means that the project was able to generate a robust outreach to the main target groups. More then 1650 participants took part in the project and third-party events, where the European Approach to Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes and ImpEA project were discussed and presented. The main participant groups were higher education institutions (approx. 1070 participants), quality assurance agencies (250), students (370), policy making bodies (100), stakeholder organisations (ENQA, ECA, ESU, EUA) and other interested parties (i.e.EQAR, ENIC-NARIC). The direct and indirect project dissemination activities were aimed to reach national, European and global audience. The wide outreach of the project has also direct and indirect impact on the main target groups. The HEIs benefit from undergoing EA-based accreditation procedure which, if it results with positive assessment, is automatically recognised in every EHEA country in which given joint programme is offered. This significantly reduces the bureaucratic burden comparing to current, national-based approach. Reduction of the administrative burden also facilitates development of new joint programmes as it encourages teaching staff, managers and students to engage in the simplify QA procedure. Successful achievement of the main sustainability-related project outcome, the EA online toolkit, supports the momentum for full implementation of the EA in EHEA. This comprehensive tool is a one-stop-shop and easily accessible medium for everyone interested in joint programmes and the European Approach. It is based on the knowledge and experience gained by the project partners in carrying out the project activities and intellectual outputs. Furthermore, its design has been strongly based on the qualitative and quantitative sources of information gathered throughout the project, i.e. online survey, focus groups, events participants' discussions and feedback, consortium brainstorming, etc. Therefore, it can be considered a sustainable source of long-term impact, beyond the project itself.In 2020, at the end of the ImpEA project, the number of EHEA countries accepting the EA-based accreditation procedure has significantly increased. This means that out of 49 EHEA countries, 29 introduced favourable legal frameworks.