We passed voluntary accreditation according to the standards of the "European Approach"
January 2023. We passed voluntary accreditation according to the standards of the "European Approach"
Governing bodies, agreements, procedures, requirements, programme, titles... The quality of the Master in Integrated STEAM Education (MASTED), designed and developed jointly by 4 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from Spain, Portugal and Brazil, has been accredited with the demanding European Approach to Quality Assurance of Joint Programs (JPs).
Joint programmes are of great interest to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as they contribute improving the mobility of students and staff; facilitating mutual learning and cooperation opportunities, and creating programmes of excellence that offer a real learning experience to students, fostering the attraction of talent worldwide. However, these programmes still face numerous obstacles in their implementation phase due to recognition and quality assurance issues at the national level.
On this basis, the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes (EA) is adopted in 2015 by the European ministers responsible for higher education, to facilitate external quality assurance of such programmes, by defining standards based on the tools of the European Higher Education Area, without taking into account national requirements.
Under this premise, in recent years, quality control agencies and stakeholders have been working together to develop and test several approaches that facilitate external quality control of joint programmes and also reflect their joint character. The result has been the European Approach that combines the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG), the Qualifications Framework for the European Higher Education Area (QF-EHEA) and the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS).
The MASTED Consortium, being aware of all this, prepared the necessary documentation using the guide of the European impEA project. Through the Agency for the Quality of the University System of Castilla y León (ACSUCyL), official certifying entity, the panel of experts was constituted and issued a provisional report based on the documentation and the visit made to the Consortium. After designing and implementing improvements in the programme, its title and procedures, the panel considered that MASTED, its structure, quality system, processes, subjects, etc. were worthy of accreditation and granted us the certification in January 2023.
The final report with the approval can be consulted in the Library section of this website.