Message of the President, January 31st, 2022
Dear friends and colleagues,
Let me first wish all of you the very best in the new year – we are hoping the year will be better than the previous one, at least in terms of the opportunity to meet, travel, and do things in the ways we are used to...
The newly constituted BoD (after the AGM in December 2021), have met on January 13, and coped with quite a few important tasks:
- Presidential election – the BoD members re-elected Pavel Zufan as continuing president of ECBE.
- Conference preparation – the BoD is fully set for immediate preparation of the ECBE Conference and standard AGM to be organized in May 18–21, 2022, in Paris. But we need your help – conference information is being updated on our website (https://ecbe.eu/index.php/paris-2022), and we are looking forward to your active contribution to the conference preparation. Please, help us, and think about a presentation you can make, and a paper to send, so that it makes sense to prepare a book of proceedings, and we re-join in a traditional way, moving ECBE forwards.
- Accepting resignation of our highly valued Director of Accreditation, Polona Tominc, who wants to fully concentrate on her Dean’s position at the home institution. We highly appreciate all the work she has done for ECBE, and we selected an appropriate replacement, Matthew Kitching, who became an integral part of the ENQA project team – more details attached at the end.
- Revising the organizational structure and summing up the open positions – we invite your proposals for members of Advisory board, and Quality committee, where we have 2 open positions in each. Due to Matthew’s move to the DoA position, there is also open a position of student representative in the BoD, where the BoD members can coopt a new member till the May AGM. And, last, but not least, we also invite your proposal for new reviewers
The ENQA process is, unfortunately, stopped – ENQA admitted process issues on their side, and proposed to refund the costs we spent on the review and to cancel it. We are refining the formal procedure of the end of the process, and will publish the information as soon as we agree with ENQA. It is certainly not the best thing to happen, but, given the issues we had to face, it is not the worst solution – we can go through the evaluation again, and prove that we are now organized in line with the ESG requirements. This, of course, will be a part of our discussions at the next AGM.
So, the most important thing at the moment is the Conference preparation. We keep the same meeting place (Paris) for the 2022 meeting, and strongly believe we will be able to organize it in the traditional way. And, again, we need your help – your active participation. So, please, try your best, and join us in preparation of a good conference.
Keep safe and optimistic.
Kind regards,
Pavel Žufan
President
Brno, January 31st, 2022
Attachment:
New Director of Accreditation
Members of the ECBE BoD are delighted to announce the appointment of Matthew Kitching as Director of Accreditation. Matthew replaces Polona Tominc, who leaves the organisation to take up the position of the Dean at the University of Maribor. I am sure that you will join me in thanking Polona for the vast amount of work that she has carried out during ECBE’s latest phase of development, and we wish her well in her new role.
Matthew joins us having held senior managerial posts in UK higher education since 2008, most recently as Deputy Chief Executive responsible for the delivery of student support services, governance and retention initiatives. He has over decade’s experience of European quality assurance, including helping agencies to develop, implement and review accreditation standards, devising and delivering training for quality assurance agencies and providing consultancy services to institutions on issues including QA and student engagement. Between 2014 and 2016 he worked as a Student Engagement Adviser for QAA UK and between 2017 and 2019 led the European Students’ Union’s Quality Assurance Expert Pool. Matthew has conducted over 85 evaluations across 3 continents for a wide range of agencies including ENQA, the European University Association, ANVUR (Italy), ZeVA (Germany), NVAO (Netherlands and Flanders), EKKA (Estonia), SKVC (Lithuania), ECCTIS, BAC and QAA (all UK) and AQU Catalunya. In addition, Matthew is currently a board member for EQ-Arts, an enhancement-led quality assurance agency for higher arts education across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).
Matthew is also a Postgraduate Researcher in the Department for Educational Research at Lancaster University, where his research focusses on comparative international studies on quality assurance, student engagement and students’ unions. He is especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches that explore higher education by drawing on management and organisational behavioural theories. For interest, his latest publication is available here: https://doi.org/10.18543/tjhe-9(1)-2021pp207-237. Matthew is also Regional Editor (Western Europe) for the Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education and a peer reviewer for several publications.
We are excited to have Matthew as part of the Executive Committee and for the contribution he is going to make to the next phase of ECBE’s development. He will be reaching out to members in the coming weeks to introduce himself, offer any assistance and to open a dialogue about your hopes for the organisation moving forward.