Quality assurance of higher education in the South Caucasus

Abstract

This issue offers insights into how the south Caucasus countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia as different sovereign nations with their distinctive cultures and ideologies share a geo-political commonality of recent Soviet occupation with 20% of Georgia territory under occupation. They share a desire to develop, modernise and operate an effective higher education system which, through creativity, ingenuity and imagination supports their educational, cultural and economic ambitions. To that end they all joined the Bologna Process at the Bergen Ministerial Conference in 2005 and have undertaken reforms of their post-colonial futures, intended to improve the quality of higher education within their country and provide opportunities for students and academics’ mobility, improvement in teaching and learning r egimes, the creation of quality assurance instruments that provide direction and focus to internal and external quality assessments and accreditation and have begun to focus on their research infrastructures. As members of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), each country has had to address its own higher education sector in order to formally comply with the agreement necessities, which critically required independent quality assurance bodies that had responsibility for programme or institutional accreditation. The consequences for each are different and details of how each has responded cannot be fully covered in this selection of papers in this special issue. What has been achieved, is a representation of responses that shine a light on the way the South Caucasus has answered the requirements for EHEA membership. It acts as a catalyst to discussion on the future direction of higher education in the region, including the furthering of large-scale alteration of national systems to include private institutions alongside nation-supported academies. Each of the articles in this special issue offers comments upon progress at a country level, reflecting action at either the strategic systematic level or at the institutional tactical levels. The articles emerged from a discussion following a conference on higher education held in Tbilisi in 2021, organised jointly by the East European and Tbilisi State universities. Each paper is introduced and contextualised under three headings: