EMINENT

EMINENT partners organised an online Project Meeting on Friday 21^st January 2021. Colleagues in Haiti and Europe Union reunited after the Christmas vacations via videoconferencing to formulate a feasible workplan to catch-up delays of project implementation. Along these lines, partners welcomed the good news about the official approval by the EACEA to extend the period for the implementation of the EMINENT project up to April 2022. This will become a great opportunity for the project to compensate the disruption generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and recovered action.

EMINENT consortium will focus the next 4 months to finalise the design of their internal quality assurance systems at faculty level, conduct self-assessment activities as well as articulate policy proposals within the Roadmap document action.

EMINENT has finished its Online Training with the celebration of the last combination of Masterclass and Tutorial Meetings on Self-Evaluation of Study Programmes, led by the University College Cork (Ireland) from 13^th July to 17^th July and in close collaboration with Haitian partners.

As a pioneer institution on Quality Assurance policy in Europe and drawing upon their extensive expertise on this field, the University College Cork framed a training centered around the concepts of Self-evaluation and learning outcomes formulation. With this purpose, the University College of Cork delivered a Masterclass which covered in-depth all the practical aspects of these concepts, looking into the details of operationalization, data collection and organizational elements of the Self-Evaluation process but also analysing the intricacies of  reformulating study programmes according to learning outcomes.

Following upon their contingency plan, EMINENT consortium celebrated from Monday 6^th July to Friday 10^th July, their 2^nd Masterclass and Tutorial Meetings on Internal Quality Assurance System conceptualization, led by the University of Alicante. 

Counting upon the participation of their Vice rectorate of Quality Assurance, the University of Alicante recorded a Masterclass, delving into the complexity of formulating Quality Assurance policy at internal level and articulating the adequate mechanisms and tools to ensure the achievement of quality on Higher Education services provision. This lecture drawn upon the institutional and personal experiences of the University of Alicante in creating and developing their own Quality Assurance system throughout the last decades, integrating into the Bologna Process and meeting the standards set within the European Higher Education Area.

EMINENT consortium has devised a contingency plan to carry forward with capacity building actions, coping with the disruption generated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This Online Training comes in substitution of D3.3.1. Train of Trainers (Module IV) which was supposed to be held in March 2020, facilitating than Haitian partners advance further on knowledge transfer and experience adaptation on Quality Assurance within Higher Education during these uncertain times.

20 representatives from the EMINENT project consortium celebrated the II and III Modules- Train of Trainers in Camaguey (Cuba), extended from Wednesday 27th November to Wednesday 4th December. The capacity building action was led by experts from the University College Cork (UCC) and the Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation from Austria (AQ Austria). Delegates from 5 Higher Education Institutions in Haiti were introduced to the wide array of tools, resources, and methodologies in order to start designing their own Internal Quality Assurance Systems and carrying out the Self Evaluation of their programmes.

Due to the persistent socio-political crisis in Haiti, EMINENT partners were forced to find an alternative location to celebrate their capacity building actions. As such, EMINENT Consortium opted to organize their meeting in the city of Camaguey, setting up a long week of intense hard-work to facilitate transfer skills which have laid the knowledge foundation for the roll-out of the project pilot exercises.

More than 25 members from the EMINENT project consortium celebrated the I Module- Train of Trainers in Port-Au-Prince (Haiti), stretching from Monday 23^th September to Wednesday 25^th September. This activity was facilitated by experts from the University of Alicante who trained representatives from 5 Higher Educations Institutions (HEIs) of the country on cutting edge issues within the field of Quality Assurance in Higher Education (HE), laying the foundation for the continuity of the capacity building action and adaptation of knowledge to Haiti. Partners were also able to celebrate a project meeting in order to orientate project action in the following months.

Twenty-two representatives of eight Haitian, Irish and Austrian Higher Education Institutions, members of the  EMINENT project, gathered together from 26th February 2019 to 1st March 2019 to celebrate the Kick Off Meeting of the project. EMINENT is a Capacity Building Higher Education project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, which aims to develop Higher Education Quality Assurance Systems in Haiti and in addition extend impact to the Caribbean region. The University of Alicante, relying upon its expertise on international project management and capacity building, coordinates this project “Towards the Enhancement and Harmonisation of HEIs Quality Assurance in Haiti in response to national and International Developments”.