6. 6. 2018
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Quality
Support for the development of the quality of adult education, especially of public adult education programmes, is a very important activity for us. We thus contribute to the realisation of the right of all adult inhabitants of Slovenia to quality education and the right of the public to be informed about the course and outcomes of such activities. We realise our fundamental mission in the assurance of the quality of adult education by:
- conducting research and development work to support the development of the quality of adult education on the system and practitioner levels;
- developing internal and external approaches for the definition, assessment and development of quality;
- producing professional groundwork for the systemic incorporation of activities in the area of quality;
- advising and training professionals in the field of adult education for the performance of self-assessment and the development of quality of their own work;
- providing expert support for the development of quality at educational organisations and promoting the exchange of knowledge and good practices;
- developing ICT support for quality development processes;
- developing professional literature in the area of quality;
- concurrently monitoring all solutions that we introduce in practice and introducing improvements based on evaluations;
- ensuring the flow of knowledge within international networks.
When developing this field, we follow the principle stating that we need to uniformly develop both the internal and the external approaches to the assessment and development of quality. The introduction of both needs to be supported by guidance and training of professionals who will implement these approaches.
The main milestone in the planning of the introduction of self-evaluation in the adult education practice is the year 2001 when we developed and first introduced into practice the Approach to self-evaluation offering quality education to adults – OQEA. The OQEA approach guides an organisation in its deliberation of the definition of quality (What do we want to be like?), assessment of quality (What are we like?) and the maintenance and development of the quality of one’s own work (How can we become even better?). In order to train adult educators for the assessment and development of quality according to the OQEA approach, we developed a new basic training programme in 2017 for the introduction and upgrading of an internal quality system at an adult education organisation – Quality Mosaic (Mozaik kakovosti).
The next important professional milestone is represented by the setup of a national network of quality counsellors for the area of adult education. The aim of the network is to train professional staff for the highest possible quality of professional counselling aimed at effective, comprehensive, systematic and continuous assessment and development of the quality of adult education at an educational organisation. We have developed a conceptual scheme of a counselling network within which we coordinate the work professionally.
The central element of the approach to the assessment and development of quality is self-evaluation; internal quality processes are upgraded with external processes. It is essential for us to “look ourselves in the mirror” in certain periods when it comes to the processes related to quality, whereby it is also important to have professional courage to plan when and how others will assess us. We therefore also develop external incentives such as: Zeleni znak kakovosti (green OQWA logo), Ekspertna zunanja evalvacija (Expert External Evaluation), Kolegialna presoja kakovosti (Peer Quality Review).
Do you need support in the development of your own internal quality systems? Visit the Quality Mosaic portal where you will find professional recommendations, tools and descriptions of good practices for the setup and development of an internal quality system.
An organisation that cares for the quality of its work will assess such quality in a planned, systematic and regular manner in order to maintain what is good, eliminate what is bad and search for opportunities for its further development.