global education dialogue: north africa morocco 2016 · internationalisation in higher education,...

GLOBAL EDUCATION DIALOGUE: NORTH AFRICAMOROCCO 2016Building a Culture of Quality; Nationally, Regionally and Globally

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CONTENTsWELCOME 04 THE GLOBAL EDUCATION DIALOGUE, MOROCCO 2016 05

PURPOsE OF THE POLICy DIALOGUE 06

PROGRAMME AND CONFERENCE DEsIGN 07

BUILDING A CULTURE OF qUALITy LOCALLy, NATIONALLy AND GLOBALLy 08

qUALITy AT WORk: POLICy, PEOPLE AND PLACEs 09

CONFERENCE PARTNERs 10

BE PART OF THE DIALOGUE – GOING GLOBAL 2016

Global Education Dialogue: North Africa, Morocco 02


WELCOME

Dear Participants

I am delighted to welcome you to Morocco, and to the first of the British Council’s Global Education Dialogue series to be held in the MENA region. The Global Education Dialogues bring together key policy makers and influencers to debate the challenges and opportunities facing international higher education and aims to encourage fresh thinking and new perspectives from governments, universities and business. This event is therefore an important opportunity for the educational ‘voice’ of North Africa to be heard – particularly as the key messages from this Dialogue will feed directly into the Going Global Conference, which is to be held in Cape Town in May 2016.

With the recent set-up of the National Agency for Evaluation and Quality Assurance, it is timely that Morocco is our host country. The Agency is currently developing its vision – and academics and practitioners will doubtless benefit from the sharing of experience and best practice that the conference will facilitate. The Morocco Policy Dialogue will highlight the importance of quality assurance and quality management for ministries and universities in both developed and developing countries. With large numbers of young people entering tertiary education in MENA, quality is critical – for

institutions, for staff and faculty and for students and their parents. But providing a quality education is just as critical for governments – which need young people with an education and twenty-first century skills, to enter and drive business, industry, research and entrepreneurship. With a long-developed higher education sector, the UK has worked through many of the issues linked to assuring quality in universities, and has valuable expertise to share. This conference will provide the opportunity to debate some of these approaches and how and whether they could be applied in Morocco and beyond.

The British Council works in English, Society, the Arts and in education. For the last few years our work in higher education in Morocco has focussed on quality assurance – in partnership with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. This conference is also a partnership and we would like to thank the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research & Executive Training, the Moroccan British Society and the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural organisation (ISESCO) for their support.

I wish you a successful and worthwhile few days

John Mitchell OBEDirector British CouncilMorocco


GLOBAL EDUCATION DIALOGUE, MOROCCO 2016

Higher education in North Africa faces the challenge of providing growing numbers of young people with a university education. Not just any education – but a quality education that prepares students effectively for the workplace, and one that teaches them knowledge and skills and enables them to contribute to the growth and economic development of their country.

With a view to improving the outcomes of higher education in the region, governments in North Africa are looking to quality assurance and quality management practices as a way to support both modernisation and reform in the sector. This is also supported by those international organisations that are active in higher education, such as, the World Bank, the European Union, the African Development Bank and ISESCO.

In Morocco – the host country for the Policy Dialogue - the issue of quality is of paramount importance to the Ministry of Higher Education, leading to the establishment of the National Agency for Evaluation and Quality Assurance of Higher Education and Scientific Research as an independent body to regulate the mechanisms of Quality Assurance in Higher Education institutions.

To support the Ministry of Higher Education and the newly established Evaluation Agency, the British Council will set up a Policy Dialogue looking at effective ways to build a culture of quality

in higher education in North Africa – through both policy and through practice. Reflecting the increasing importance of internationalisation in higher education, this Policy Dialogue will be part of the British Council’s Global Education Dialogue Series, linked it to the Going Global conference in May 2016.

With its mature higher education system and an internationally recognised approach to quality assurance, the UK sector has a wealth of expertise to share – from policy and regulation through to quality enhancement. This Policy Dialogue will also enhance the mutual benefit for the UK towards sharing best practice and learning from the international approaches to quality presented at the conference. This will enrich the conversation around common challenges, and how to build a culture of quality within institutions and agencies across the North Africa and the UK.


PURPOsE OF THE POLICy DIALOGUE

• To exchange ideas around best practices in quality assurance in higher education with key experts from the region and the UK with a particular focus on internal and external strategies for building a quality culture.

• To inform new thinking around the policy and practice of quality assurance in higher education in North Africa.

• To consider strategies for setting and maintaining academic standards that are comparable to international best practice.

• To provide an opportunity for policy makers and academics in North Africa to take advantage of the experience of the UK in terms of quality assurance with insight into how policy around quality assurance in the UK impacts on the practice of quality at an institutional level.

• To promote the enhancement of quality to meet the expectations of students, employers and other stakeholders.

• To explore opportunities for delegates from North Africa to build relationships with UK colleagues, thereby encouraging the exchange of further knowledge and information between North Africa and the UK.

• To develop new approaches to quality assurance in North Africa, in support of national higher education policy and emerging practice in universities in the region.

THE AUDIENCE

Participants and speakers will be invited from our select partners and Ministries, attending from Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kenya and the UK.


PROGRAMME CONFERENCE DEsIGN

The Global Education Dialogues series explores the most pressing and espace entre potentially challenging themes in international higher education and skills in the region and globally.

The added value of collaboration, knowledge sharing and exposure to internationalised higher education allow for North Africa, the UK and the global academy to create enterprising and creative solutions to problems and find new ways of working across boundaries locally and globally.The series will be outcome and solutionsfocused, with great potential for partnerships and collaborations among delegates.

The Global Education Dialogue will discuss some of the global experiences, best practice, challenges and solutions towards Quality Assurance in Education. The conference is run by the British Council in partnership with the Ministry of Higher Education Morocco, the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO), and the Moroccan British Society (MBS).

The conference provides a safe space for candid conversations in formal (plenary) and informal (workshop) sessions, and a unique opportunity to identify and discuss common challenges and share ideas, insights and experiences that may help to overcome these obstacles and to bridge the gap across the international communities

The conference programme design provides a relaxed setting for leaders to discuss, debate, think and share ideas to promote learning and networking. It combines chaired presentations and panel discussions, and small focus group discussions.

The conference will provide an opportunity for agenuine exchange of views and experience between the region and in the UK and the opportunity to understand the different perspectives and ideas of people from all of the participating countries.


The first day of the conference, held under the theme: “Building a Culture of Quality“, will consist of three plenary conferences and four workshops.

Based on the experiences of the United Kingdom and Kenya, the plenary conferences will suggest a few thoughts on the quality of higher education and address the evolution of quality assurance systems and their successive transformations in connection with the continuously renewed priorities of higher education systems.

What type of demand should be met by a quality assurance system? How will it be implemented? What constant patterns are encountered in the various quality assurance systems and what are the specificities of each system in relation with its cultural, economic and social context? What are the most recent developments that the quality assurance systems are undergoing? These are some of the questions upon which the plenary conferences will shed light through the experience of the United Kingdom, as a pioneering system that has gained international recognition today and has built upon its significant expertise in the area of quality assurance, as well as through the experience of Kenya, as a developing system strongly engaged in building a culture of quality and in strengthening its quality assurance framework.

The first session of the workshops will propose, in an interactive framework, to put into perspective quality in higher education through an overview of the history of Higher Education systems in the Middle East and North Africa region. It will also address the challenges faced by its systems as well as their future prospects.

The second session of the workshops will highlight the experience of the Kingdom of Morocco, the host country for the conference, in the area of quality assurance, as well as the experience of the “University Governance Screening Card”, a tool developed within the framework of a World Bank programme designed to analyze the governance of universities.

BUILDING A CULTURE OF qUALITy LOCALLy, NATIONALLy AND GLOBALLy


qUALITy AT WORk: POLICy, PEOPLE AND PLACEs

The second day of the conference, which will address “Strategies, Actors and Situations” proposes two plenary conferences, two workshops and a panel discussion.

The first plenary conference will be devoted to quality and quality assurance in scientific research; how to define excellence in scientific research; what mechanisms can be useful to ensure quality in research activities? What criteria and standards will best support the development of research? What are the main recommendations that can help us build upon the experience of the United Kingdom in this area and what are the main standards at international level? These are some of the questions to be addressed. The first workshop of the day will focus on actions taken within universities in order to establish and maintain academic standards. What strategies and action plans are implemented; how are these strategies being deployed in privately managed universities and in those that host a large number of students? These are some of the experiences that will be at the heart of the exchange of views in this workshop.

The second workshop will focus on the role of students and employers who are the major players for establishing, sustaining and developing a quality assurance system. The experiences of United Kingdom universities and those of the MENA region will be presented and discussed. In the light of increasing mobility, internationalisation of higher education and globalization of exchanges are impacting quality assurance systems. This issue will be addressed by a panel discussion gathering key players from different countries and will be followed by the closing session of the conference.

Global Education Dialogue: North Africa, Morocco10

CONFERENCE PARTNERSWe gratefully acknowledge the support of our partners

Kingdom of Morocco Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Training

The MESRSF is the governmental authority in charge of higher education, scientific research and training of executives. The Department of Higher Education and Pedagogical Development (DESDP), a component of the Ministry, contributes to the in partnership with the relevant parties to defining national policies in the field of higher education and scientific research. The DESDP develops and implements the national strategy for the development of higher education namely through:Design, planning and promotion of monitoring and university training offers at national level. Design, preparation, implementation, and monitoring of evaluation of the pedagogical reforms.Developing higher education and promoting opening university to its socio-economic environment.Promoting contracting in universitiesMonitoring universities for the sake of their capacity building in the pedagogical fields.Developing and implementing a Quality Assurance System.Participation in defining, implementing and monitoring cooperation programmes.Promoting and developing higher education that is not the within the authority of universities and private higher education.

Moroccan British Society

The Moroccan British Society (MBS) aims at encouraging good relations and cooperative ties between Morocco and the United Kingdom through collaborative agreements between institutions and organs of both states; it promotes the means necessary for reciprocal information between both Moroccan and British circles interested in the essential historical aspects of both countries, their contemporary reality, and the forms of bilateral cooperation between the two States. The MBS seeks also to allow Moroccans and British people to acquire a better mutual understanding of their cultural, political and economic institutions so as to promote their friendly relations in every domain.

Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is an international specialized body of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Its core objectives are to strengthen, promote and consolidate cooperation among Member States in the fields of Education, Science, Culture and Communication, as well as develop and upgrade these fields, within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of human Islamic values and ideals; promote dialogue among civilizations, cultures and religions; work for upgrading the quality, establishing and maintaining links with the educational, higher education, scientific and technological systems of the Member States; support the efforts of educational, scientific and cultural institutions for Muslims in non-Member States of ISESCO, etc.

To date, the Organization has 52 member States from the Arab World, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

BE PART OF THE DIALOGUEGOING GLOBAL 20163 5 May 2016Cape Town International Conference Centre

Going Global is the world’s largest open conference for leaders of international education, attracting leaders, policymakers, and influential practitioners from the post-school education sectors.

Join more than 1,000 leaders in Cape Town forGoing Global 2016.

Registration opens 25 January 2016!www.britishcouncil.org/going-global

#GoingGlobal2015@HEGoingGlobal

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.© British Council 2016

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

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