HOW COMMITTED TO TEACHING QUALITY IS YOUR INSTITUTION? - THE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION QUALITY MODEL (THEQM) - UTILIZING NINETY NINE PLUS ONE QUALITY INDICATORS

Teaching quality is becoming a strategic direction of the European Higher Education Area reforms. Its importance is recently gaining more and more recognition by both the policy makers as well as the various providers of higher education. The vision and mission of Universities, even of those universities who have been traditionally focused mainly on basic research address now a more balanced provision of teaching and research. This paper introduces THEQM, the Teaching in Higher Education Quality Model. THEQM is a model, which measures the commitment of institutions of Higher Education to teaching quality. The model is based on the Report of the European Commission (EC) "Improving the quality of teaching and learning in Europe's higher education institutions". Based on the various recommendations for improving teaching, addressed in the report, we have defined one hundred (ninety nine plus one) quality indicators and propose herein, a model based on a numeric system for measuring the adherence to these recommendations/indicators by a particular institution, thus measuring the institution's commitment to teaching quality. Herein, we refer to teaching in the more general form of teaching and learning as encompassed in the student centred learning model, thus referring to all learning activities that involve the educator/teacher as facilitator of the student learning process. We are in the process of receiving feedback for our model and at the same time building a web-based tool, namely THEQMTool that will provide an on-line version of THEQM; the tool will allow an institution to carry out a self-assessment of its commitment to teaching quality, and find out how it compares (ranking wise and anonymously) to a number of other institutions that have carried out the same self-assessment exercise.