Projects

Quality Assurance Projects

QAHEL: Quality Assurance for Higher Education in Lebanon
M.U.B.S. has been awarded a second EU project titled Quality Assurance for Higher Education in Lebanon (QAHEL). The objective of this project is to make the Lebanese Higher Education Institutions aware of the European Quality Assurance processes and to help them reform their higher education systems by achieving greater compatibility and comparability with the European systems of Higher Education. The grant holder of the project is the University of Sunderland (UK), the coordinator is M.U.B.S. (Lebanon) and the other partners are American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Beirut Arab University (Lebanon), CERAM (France), Hariri Canadian University (Lebanon) and Directorate General of Higher Education in Lebanon.

The general objective of this project is to make the Lebanese higher education institutions aware of the European higher education quality models and to allow them to benefit from the European experiences in the field of quality assurance through:

• Designing and developing three training guides in quality assurance for higher education.
• Training Lebanese academics to become experts in the field.
• Encouraging and help higher education institutions to establish their own institutional quality centers.
• Benefiting from this program as a base for institutional self-improvement in the field.

The outcomes of this project are:

• Preparing training guides in the field of quality assurance and making them available to all institutions of higher educations through the project website.
• Training Lebanese academics (from all Lebanese higher education institutions) on higher education quality assurance.
• Suggesting performance indicators and standards for quality assurance for the Lebanese higher education institutions.

Running Projects:

ALTAIR Project
Project background
In a globalised world where knowledge creation is essential and competition becomes critical, Higher Education Institutions are put under pressure to formulate, discuss and communicate clear priorities and focus on efficient management, planning and resource processes to achieve excellence and ensure continuous performance improvement. In recent years, many Arab Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has been adversely affected by economic social and even political conflict situations as well as by diminishing financial resources.
In view to this, the overall objective of the project is to strengthen the institutional capacity of Arab Universities in support of policy, management and planning at national and regional levels in order to meet accountability needs and successfully address growing demands upon Arab HEIs, despite diminishing resources.

Objective
A major mean capable to simultaneously generate improvement of Universities management, planning capacities and overall institutional performance is the development and embedding of a quality culture for institutional quality assurance within HEIs. Referring to the European experience and the statement of the Berlin Communiqué stressing that “the primary responsibility for assuring quality lies with higher education institutions”, it is evident that putting in place effective mechanisms for assuring quality within an institution enables a critical self-analysis of its programmes, its institutional capacities and its services as well as formulation of recommendations for improvements. In consequence embedding quality culture and continuous implementation of self-assessment mechanisms within HEIs may lead to increased efficiency of planning, administrative and management of Universities.

In view to this, the specific project objective addresses the Development of sustainable Quality Culture and Capacity Building Quality Assurance in Arab Universities (AUs).

Partners include:
University of Alicante (Spain), Ministère de l’Education Nationale (Morocco), Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Spain), Association of arab universities (Jordan), Newcastle university (United Kingdom), Beirut Arab University (Lebanon), Direction Général de L’Enseignement Supérieur (Lebanon) and M.U.B.S (Lebanon) in addition to many other universities from Germany, UK, Palestine & Egypt.

For more information about the project, please visit www.altair-project.org