QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ELECTRONICS-ICT ENGINEERING EDUCATION

This paper outlines a system of internal quality assurance and its concomitant education support services for the teaching staff and study programme committee of the electronics ICT engineering education at the faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Ghent University. Living up to the Ghent University credo ’Dare to Think’, this system is a fully-fledged quality culture, in which all stakeholders naturally strive for continuous quality assurance as well as quality enhancement. It offers information on our study programme’s unique selling points and on its strengths and weaknesses with regard to quality assurance. Our study programme carries out annually a critical self-reflection on the following two features: programme specific content and quality culture, meanwhile explicitly following the CDIO guidelines. The responsibility lies with our programme committee, also in charge of generating and cultivating the engagement of all relevant stakeholders: students, lecturing staff, professional field, alumni, international peers and experts. Since in the new system the programme specific content plays a more important role, guidelines to facilitate embedding the external perspective are developed. Quality performance tools are essential to promote a qualitative and systematic reflection process. Therefore, an education monitor is used as a team site and document management system. A manageable set of programme-specific operational objectives have been integrated into this education monitor, are easy to assess and linked to the data made available through our business intelligence system. This education monitor is data-driven, with a proper dashboard function. In summary, the above-mentioned quality performance tools enable us to draw up an annual quality improvement plan. In this paper, all parts of the quality assurance system are described, supported by the CDIO standard programme evaluation.